An average contribution to a variety of political debates.
Investigative reporting and anecdotes demonstrate why the author believes United States citizens should fear governments at all levels.
A journalist and self-described “leftist libertarian,” Kirby (Death at SeaWorld: Shamu and the Dark Side of Killer Whales in Captivity, 2012, etc.) certainly understands the vital roles of governments regarding roads, parks, schools, consumer safety, environmental protection, and even law enforcement. In this book, the author focuses on how and why government entities in Washington, D.C., state capitals, county seats, city halls, and law enforcement complexes consistently restrict the rights of Americans. Kirby hopes to raise individual consciousness with the case studies and then encourage individuals to mobilize against government overreach, whether it is well intended or motivated by corruption. The chapters focus on warrantless police searches of residences; child protective services removing juveniles from families; incarceration of suspects for minor alleged offenses or inability to pay bail (manifested in the proliferation of “modern-day debtors’ prisons”); a law enforcement practice known as forfeiture, which strips cash and other assets from alleged criminals, many of whom are not guilty; suppression of free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment; governmental invasions of individual privacy; a malfunctioning criminal justice system revolving around out-of-control police, inefficient courts, and mass incarceration in inhumane jails and prisons. The author also explains why he decided to exclude a chapter about voter suppression by governments, suppression aimed unequally at people of color. He goes on to delineate why he decided to omit Second Amendment controversies over gun ownership and government-enforced gun control. Kirby generally avoids partisan political verbiage; throughout the narrative, he chooses case studies that reflect poorly on nearly everyone involved in the political process: Republicans, Democrats, and so-called civil servants who are unaffiliated. Readers who pay attention to the news behind the headlines will already know much of this information, and Kirby’s proposed reforms at the end of each chapter are intriguing but probably mostly impractical in the current political climate.
An average contribution to a variety of political debates.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-06436-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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