Not an ideal blueprint, but Rodrik raises—and gamely tries to answer—some important questions.
An economist’s idealistic proposal to take some of the global out of globalization.
In the wake of the subprime-mortgage crisis and worldwide economic downturn, most readers will agree with the author’s premise that globalization, and in particular financial globalization, is not all it’s cracked up to be. Rodrik (International Political Economy/Harvard Univ.; One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth, 2007, etc.) submits that there’s a better way of doing business, one that coalesces as he presents his theory that the world economy boils down to a triangular game of give-and-take. The author defines three key elements of the world economy—hyperglobalization (unfettered trade and financial exchange), democracy and the nation state—that he contends cannot all simultaneously coexist. However, he writes, we should aim for two out of three. Rodrik argues that the least important element in terms of the world’s economic, social and political health is globalization itself, noting that economic models predict only minimal net gain from the continued lowering of international barriers. He suggests furthering worldwide democratization and strengthening, not weakening, governmental intervention to provide an effective framework that preserves local values and protects domestic economies while paving the way for relatively—but not completely—free economic and financial interaction. His arguments are often effective, if occasionally overly simplistic, though at times it’s difficult to pinpoint his audience. He acknowledges that any economist worth his salt is fully cognizant of the perils of globalization, which often ignored in public forums, yet his economic arguments may sail over the heads of lay readers despite attempts to simplify the concepts. A trite closing parable, rather than reinforcing his salient points, simply underscores how messy and complicated reality is in comparison to even the most elegant proposed solutions.
Not an ideal blueprint, but Rodrik raises—and gamely tries to answer—some important questions.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-07161-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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