Sciolino incorporates numerous interviews in order to preserve a shrewd, journalistic distance in this illuminating book.
An American journalist in Paris offers a serious, skeptical study of France’s quintessential “soft power.”
The art of getting results by attraction rather than coercion is a long specialty of the French, especially in terms of politics, foreign policy, language, manners, food, culture and style. New York Times Paris correspondent Sciolino (Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran, 2000, etc.) presents some of the prevailing, socially accepted uses of opération séduction (“charm offensive”) that both bemuse her sense of American pragmatism and arouse her incredulity. Men of a certain age still tender the baisemain to married women (Hillary Clinton got one from President Sarkozy), women learn from the cradle to dress provocatively (and then welcome admiring remarks from strangers) and married people routinely take lovers as part of keeping “in good health,” while France’s national symbol is a sexy, barefoot commoner named Marianne whose bodice falls half undone. French politicians cannot get elected if they can’t demonstrate a vigorous capability: Case in point, when Sarkozy’s wife of many years left him for another man, he married supermodel Carla Bruni in a hurry and found his approval ratings soar. French shamelessness extends to politicians such as former presidents Mitterand, Giscard d’Estaing and Chirac, for whom the political office was another form of seduction. French professional women do not seem to be concerned that insistent male attention would be called harassment in the United States. Ultimately, Sciolino grates at the real problem unsettling the French—i.e., their fear of declinism, or decline. Their traditional arts of seduction—slow food, lace, finely crafted luxury items, etc.—are being threatened by globalization, eliciting a heavy sense of nostalgia for the era when beauty and pleasure reigned. Moreover, French leaders like Sarkozy still embrace a “profound unity of our culture,” even though about 10 percent of France’s population is “of Arab and African origin or descent,” underscoring deep fissures in France’s sense of its own national identity.
Sciolino incorporates numerous interviews in order to preserve a shrewd, journalistic distance in this illuminating book.Pub Date: June 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9115-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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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