An earnest and valuable jeremiad insisting, reasonably, that ethical behavior is imperative when parsing the nearly...
Firsthand accounts from the occupied West Bank.
Shulman (Humanistic Studies/Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem; Tamil: A Biography, 2016, etc.)—a MacArthur fellow, winner of the Israel Prize, former Israeli Defense Force officer, and an active grass-roots peace activist—presents his impassioned report on the nonviolent Israeli-Palestinian joint efforts to stop the settlements in the West Bank. In Hebron, there is the tomb of the scriptural patriarchs, a burial place, according to the Bible, purchased by Abraham. Not far are the South Hebron Hills, where Jews and Palestinians claim the same land. In this collection of artful yet often passionately angry essays, the author writes about malevolent settlers, aided by their government, who steal the land from peaceful shepherds and farmers. Roads are blocked, and wells are declared off-limits. Shulman recalls countless confrontations of unreasonable, brutal soldiers with confused, frightened residents. Settlers, he tells us, assault the native population. Representatives of the peace movements, like the author, intervene when they can, courting arrest as they try to shame and reason with adamant authority. Resistance in the beautiful Judean Mountains can be surreal and scary. Shulman bears witness to the wickedness he sees in the Israeli settlers, police, bureaucrats, soldiers, judges, security guards, and the willfully passive. (He does not discuss the Palestinian Authority in the area). In his meditations on freedom, truth, and resistance he recruits the likes of Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, and Socrates, and he offers aphorisms such as, “freedom eludes the person who pursues it deliberately.” Regarding truth, Shulman argues that there are forms “that are not relevant to this discussion—factual truth, for example, which generally tends to the disastrous.” He prefers “ethical truths.” As the author proudly asserts his humble efforts to do good, he concludes, “Israelis need to be liberated from the Occupation no less than the Palestinians need to become free.”
An earnest and valuable jeremiad insisting, reasonably, that ethical behavior is imperative when parsing the nearly impossible Israeli-Palestinian conundrum.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-226-56665-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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