It’s a huge business, drugs, drug-fueled revolution, and singing about them, and Wald does a superb job of taking his...
A fascinating journey south and north of the border on the trail of songs about marijuana, cocaine, and Monica Lewinsky.
“Though the Anglo media act as if the current Latin music boom were driven by Afro-Caribbean styles like salsa and merengue,” writes music journalist and blues historian Wald (River of Song, 1999), “Mexican bands account for roughly two-thirds of domestic Latin record sales.” And while there are plenty of Mexican rock, folk, jazz, and even rap acts, the bulk of those sales are in the norteño genre, Mexico’s equivalent of country music, which mixes elements of Central European polka and German oom-pah-pah with flamenco and other Spanish-born styles. A norteño staple is the corrido, a longish folk ballad often celebrating the exploits of Robin Hood–like bandits, revolutionary heroes, and other outlaws. Lately Mexican artists have taken to updating their subjects to include Zapatista guerrillas, drug smugglers, and other figures taken from the daily headlines; one group in particular, Los Tigres del Norte, with whose members Wald spends much time in these pages, has made a lucrative specialty of celebrating the very people American law enforcement has pledged to eliminate. That drugs should be such a popular theme is no surprise, according to Wald, for all of Mexico is awash in contraband and dependent on the income it brings; one resident of the city of Culiacán tells him, “There are only three wealthy families here that have no drug connections in their history . . . and that number is not just symbolic or poetic license.” That’s all well and good, the composers reply; did not the Kennedys, who also figure in corridos, make their fortune bootlegging and then investing in legal enterprises?
It’s a huge business, drugs, drug-fueled revolution, and singing about them, and Wald does a superb job of taking his readers into that world.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-621024-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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
SEEN & HEARD
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