A solid work of reportage on life inside one of America’s toughest prisons. Angola, La., is this nation’s version of Devil’s Island, a swamp-bound expanse of territory larger than Manhattan. The place, writes novelist Bergner (Moments of Favor, 1991), is also strangely beautiful, a tropical wonderland of magnolia, oak, cypress, and crab apple—hardly the common version of hell. Yet hell it is. Bergner writes of men who, for entertainment and revenge, fling feces at one another, cut each other with homemade knives, kill, and maim. Considered the toughest prison in a state with —a good claim to the toughest sentencing laws in the nation,— Angola was a place where many entered and few left, where guards behaved with studied brutality. The Supreme Court, Bergner writes, found that Angola’s wardens so regularly violated the constitutional rights of the inmates that it ordered federal oversight of the prison, including the replacement of the old wardens with a new breed more attuned to modern theories of penology. One of those newcomers, Burl Cain, especially fascinates Bergner. A no-nonsense lawgiver, Cain believes in redemption and rehabilitation, and one of his innovations was the creation of a prison rodeo that draws onlookers from miles around to see the residents of Angola compete against sharp-horned bulls for a small cash purse. This rodeo provides Bergner with a useful framing device for his narrative, but it is also an object lesson in empty symbolism—for the dangerous rodeo offers small rewards and costs its participants dearly. We owe the prisoners little, Bergner writes, for in the main they have brought their fates on themselves. Yet even he argues that we owe them more than —a perverse rodeo as a vehicle for self-improvement and a way to make themselves known.— Although no classic of criminology or of muckraking journalism, Bergner’s book is, all the same, an interesting glimpse at the underside of American life.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-609-60105-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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