A powerful, groundlevel perspective on one of the greatest tragedies of our time.
A collection of 50 impassioned, damning essays on the consequences of the Middle East peace process.
In his latest book on IsraeliPalestinian relations, Said (Out of Place, 1999, etc.) blasts all the major players. He criticizes the Oslo peace process as a sham, attacks Israeli politicians as manipulative, and, most surprisingly, labels Yasir Arafat, head of the Palestinian Authority, as corrupt and incompetent. Based mostly on recent visits to the West Bank, these wonderfully clear and generous essays document how the Oslo accords created an illusory veil of peace behind which Israel continues to build settlements on traditionally Arab land, and how Arafat wastes international aid in support of the tiny zones where he has been allowed control. Said doesn’t hide his disgust for Arafat. While Israel often acts despicably—closing Jerusalem off to West Bank Palestinians, bulldozing Arab communities without warning—Said argues that it at least does so out of national selfinterest. The former head of the PLO, on the other hand, has become like most other contemporary Arab leaders: he rules solely for personal gain instead of in the interests of his people. Said details how Arafat, under the peace accords, has purposefully hobbled Palestinian civil society, creating multitudes of sinecurial posts for his flunkies and, worse, an apparatus of security services whose goal seems only to be keeping the Palestinian people in line for the Israelis. This while universities, health care, and roads decay. The best essay in the collection is “On Visiting Wadie,” an account of the author visiting his Americanborn son, who at the time was living and working in the West Bank. Here the decadence of the IsraelArafat regime is set against the promise of Wadie’s friends, young and old Palestinians working in organizations dedicated to the advancement of human rights. Such activists serve as a hopeful counterpoint to Said’s otherwise dismal picture.
A powerful, groundlevel perspective on one of the greatest tragedies of our time.Pub Date: April 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40930-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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