A thoughtful and useful consideration of the fate of cities in the age of Covid-19.
A sweeping investigation of threats to urban life.
Harvard economists Glaeser, who specializes in urban economics, and Cutler, who focuses on health care, believe that cities offer unequaled settings for creativity, commerce, entrepreneurship, and enjoyment. “Humanity crafted itself an urban world because proximity is valuable,” they write, even though proximity also allows illnesses to spread easily. The authors examine incidences of contagion throughout history, including plague in medieval Europe; yellow fever in 18th-century Philadelphia; waves of cholera, which surged globally before reaching the New World in the spring of 1832; the influenza pandemic of 1918; and, of course, Covid-19 (some of the data on this virus is unavoidably outdated). “A central theme of this book,” write the authors, “is that the vulnerability of large, dense, interconnected cities requires an effective, proactive public sector: a shared strength that serves everyone.” They suggest ways to effectively enact quarantine, such as an international early warning system, cooperation to shut down international travel, and sequestration of impacted regions. Because the World Health Organization is hobbled by an unwieldy structure, they propose a NATO-like organization to respond to global health challenges. They critique the U.S. health care industry, which rations care through high prices. “The failure to fund public health,” they assert, “is part of the larger problem that our private and public insurance programs are set up primarily to cover acute illness costs, not to prevent disease.” Besides analyzing health issues, the authors look at other urban challenges, such as “overly expensive housing, violent conflict over gentrification, persistently low levels of upward mobility, and outrage over brutal and racially targeted policing and long prison sentences for minor drug crimes.” Among their proposals for measures that would enhance city life are extensive reforms to business and land use regulations, the strengthening of schools, and policing that would “both prevent crime and respect every citizen.”
A thoughtful and useful consideration of the fate of cities in the age of Covid-19.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-29768-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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