Zirin rightfully chastises uncompromising free-market ideologues who happily accept social welfare. Now, if he could only...
Nation sports writer Zirin (People’s History of Sports in the United States, 2008, etc.) continues his sports-themed muckraking with a blistering screed against the owners of major U.S. sports teams.
As sports increasingly become big business, the men who fund America’s major-league football, baseball, basketball and hockey teams have gained considerable influence. The author calls out these deep-pocketed billionaires for an extensive array of moral and ethical crimes, ranging from bilking taxpayers to build new stadiums (and offering nothing in return) to using their teams to promote right-wing religious and political agendas. He makes a compelling case that publicly funded stadiums rarely, if ever, benefit a community. He cites three damning examples: New Orleans, where Katrina victims huddled in the publicly funded Superdome while neglected levees gave way; Minneapolis, where a groundbreaking ceremony for a new stadium was sheepishly cancelled after the collapse of a decrepit bridge killed 13 people; and Washington, D.C., where politicians committed $1 billion of public money for a baseball stadium despite enduring the district’s highest poverty level in a decade. Zirin caustically, almost gleefully, castigates notorious owners, including the dictatorial George Steinbrenner (New York Yankees), the housing slumlord Donald Sterling (Los Angeles Clippers), the Napoleonic Daniel Snyder (Washington Redskins) and the misogynistic beneficiary of nepotism James Dolan (New York Knicks). Overall, the author’s arguments hit the mark, though he occasionally confuses personal bêtes noires with righteous anger on behalf of the masses, such as when he rails against owners’ religious and political affiliations. He also heaps praise on the utopian public-ownership model of the Green Bay Packers, but offers no other hopes for a working alternative. It’s hard to believe that he couldn’t find at least one socially benevolent owner—Mark Cuban? Robert Kraft?—to profile.
Zirin rightfully chastises uncompromising free-market ideologues who happily accept social welfare. Now, if he could only make them listen.Pub Date: July 20, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5475-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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