Candid, empathetic portraits of silenced men, women, and children.
A journey across America reveals stories from communities forgotten and destroyed.
In 2011, Wall Street bond trader Arnade, who often took long walks around New York, decided to explore the Hunts Point neighborhood of the South Bronx, an area he had been warned was dangerous and forbidding. What he found surprised him: a “welcoming, warm, and beautiful” community, unfairly stigmatized, he thought, because of drugs and sex work. For the next year, he frequented dive bars, McDonald’s, and evangelical churches, where residents told him about the complexities and challenges of their lives, a reality that contrasted starkly with his “cloistered and privileged” world. Questioning his own values, the author quit his job to immerse himself fully in Hunts Point: talking, listening, and trying to help—driving people to detox, prison, or a hospital or doling out small amounts of cash to help them get by. Unfortunately, he got pulled into their lives more fully than he had planned and, for a short time, ended up abusing drugs and alcohol. However, his experience led him to embark on a larger project: a journey to other poor, neglected neighborhoods—“black, white, Hispanic, rural, urban”—to document, in photographs and narrative, life in the nation’s “back row.” In every community, Arnade listened to residents’ life stories: about drug addiction, alcoholism, homelessness, abuse, unemployment, and eviction. He listened, also, as people told him about the importance of faith to help them make peace with their lack of control over their lives and connect them with “something beyond the material.” Arnade strives to afford each individual respect for choices made and understanding for opportunities denied. Although he concludes that everyone—in the front row and the back—must listen, keep from being judgmental, and understand others’ values, he offers no other suggestions for changing an exclusionary, exploitative, racist system that has created vast economic and social inequality, drug addiction, and humiliation. Some analysis would have given this moving volume more heft.
Candid, empathetic portraits of silenced men, women, and children.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53473-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sentinel
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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