Excellent, accessible overview of socioeconomic trends over the last decades and what they bode for the future.
A senior writer at the New York Times argues that lack of investment in the next generation is keeping Americans from attaining the so-called American dream.
As Leonhardt reports in this well-researched, thoughtful work, the phrase “American Dream,” coined during the Great Depression, was once meaningful to many poor, struggling, and immigrant American families, but now it’s often used “ironically or bitterly.” Using a combination of personal stories and statistics, the author demonstrates that “a shining future” in the form of better educational prospects, jobs with livable wages, and greater health and material well-being than one’s parents enjoyed was very much in reach for many Americans by the mid-20th century. For example, Leonhardt learned from a longitudinal study that tracked progress for Americans in terms of tax rates that an astounding 92% of children born in 1940 grew up to have higher household income than their parents. Until the 1980s, quality of life improved dramatically in terms of physical health, declines in inequality, rising incomes, and material benefits, and the bounty was shared relatively broadly. However, in the last three to four decades, inequality has widened. “The result,” writes the author, “is stagnation in nearly every reliable measure of well-being.” He examines trends in power, business culture, and investment, arguing that the “rough-and-tumble capitalism” under recent Republican administrations has run roughshod over “democratic capitalism,” which “describes a system in which the government recognizes its crucial role in guiding the economy.” Leonhardt illustrates his argument through the work of influential Americans across the ideological spectrum, from Frances Perkins to Dwight Eisenhower and Robert Bork. His economics-heavy overview considers factors such as the decline of labor unions, split within left-leaning political circles, embrace of law and order, rise of interest groups, and decline in investment in education, among others.
Excellent, accessible overview of socioeconomic trends over the last decades and what they bode for the future.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9780812993202
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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