Not quite Terkel or Jane Jacobs redux, but Gibson delivers adequate sociology about current urban life, with the edgy,...
A New York journalist finds the vox populi of the metropolis in regard to the vexing problem of gentrification.
Offered in the mode of Studs Terkel’s effective and affecting oral histories, these interviews are restricted to one subject. Gentrification seems to be a law of nature in the boroughs of New York City, as new skyscraping residential towers cast their long shadows and high-rise condos invade historic districts. In this natural follow-up to his previous book, Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today’s Changing Economy (2012), Gibson chronicles his interviews with typical New Yorkers about the sad effects. He follows the developers, the lawyers, and the wealthy usurpers, as well as the artists, the shopkeepers, and the community organizers. He visited the housing court, the projects, and the lofts, and he provides a voice for a variety of people, registering grievances about owners who refuse to maintain their buildings, hoping to drive their rent-controlled tenants out. Gibson also voices landlords’ complaints about slovenly tenants. The residents want respect, safety, and the coffee shops that are emblematic of decent neighborhoods; the owners want profits. “Community” is the most common noun in the conversations with these aggrieved victims of gentrification. Throughout, the wise women and the cool guys with significant street cred are verbose, articulate, and self-confident. They are, after all, New Yorkers. Gibson, their interlocutor, is unquestionably passionate about the causes of those whose neighborhoods are transmuted and become out of their reach and those whose flops, pads, and squats are transformed into unoccupied palatial apartments for plutocrats. The author's tract is earnestly sincere, though it is diminished by its unrelieved specificity.
Not quite Terkel or Jane Jacobs redux, but Gibson delivers adequate sociology about current urban life, with the edgy, pungent flavor of the Big Apple.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0861-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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