Not exactly haunting, but there’s some frightfully nice reportage on the history of a lively festival. Boo! (16-page color...
There were no razor blades in the Halloween apples. That trick-or-treat caper is an urban legend, says Skal, who knows about creepy movies and other scary stuff (Screams of Reason, 1998, etc.).
In his current chronicle of the spooky and the outré, Skal traces the Celtic origins of our unsanctioned, goofy holiday, noting the accretion of vegetable and skeletal aspects like cabbage night, jack-o’-lanterns and macabre masquerades. The story expands to a study of some of the dotty aspects of our civilization, including the difficulty of adopting a black kitten in October. Naturally, with ties to beer and Charley Brown’s Great Pumpkin, Halloween has been co-opted by commerce. Consider all the theme parks, elaborate or cheesy, artfully designed to get the clientele to wet themselves (a topic discussed in a footnote). Peruse Happy Halloween magazine, Haunted Attraction quarterly, or the journal Selling Halloween. The town of Salem, Massachusetts, may exploit its history as the site of witchcraft trials, but the love of money isn’t always the root of Halloween foolery. Skal visits “yard haunters” who elaborately decorate their lawns and homes each fall. He profiles Goths and buffs and collectors of arcana and modern Wiccans, whom he seems to understand better than the antiabortionist and evangelical interlopers. The last night of October has a special meaning, too, for the gay community, which holds annual, fanciful parades that must be the mainstay of the rhinestone and sequin trade. Film clearly is an important contributor to the aesthetics of bloody amusement and there is a full exegesis of the Halloween series, its progenitors, and progeny. Plainly, the holiday isn’t what it used to be. A coda offers the image of the phoenix as properly life-affirming after September 11.
Not exactly haunting, but there’s some frightfully nice reportage on the history of a lively festival. Boo! (16-page color insert, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58234-230-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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