A slender volume with a substantial and significant message.
An African-American Newsweek columnist addresses a candid and compassionate open letter to the black men of America.
Cose (The Best Defense, 1998, etc.) scatters in myriad places substantial blame for what he describes—in passionate and often painful prose—as the alarming circumstances of America’s black men. “To be born a black male in America,” he writes, “is to be put into shackles and then challenged to escape.” With his characteristic wide view, Cose argues that black men have placed some of those shackles on their own ankles. He decries, for example, the determination of many black teenagers to emulate in dress and behavior the anti-intellectual (and even criminal) portions of their culture. He urges blacks to reject the new stereotypes that the popular culture promulgates. But he also recognizes that many wounds are not self-inflicted: schools in the inner city are beneath awful, and the legal and penal systems are far more punitive with blacks than whites. He cites evidence that nearly one million black men are currently in jail and that perhaps one-fourth of black men can expect to spend some time behind bars. These are numbers rich in dread and ripe with danger. But Cose also tells success stories. And so we hear about Maurice Ashley, the first (and only) black grand master in US chess history. We learn about Franklin Delano Raines (head of Fannie Mae). And about Mike Gibson, a Morehouse College student who overcame a history of drugs, crime, and prison and transformed his life. Cose also examines the difficult issues of relationships in the black family, excoriating men for their failures as fathers and husbands. But he also explodes some pervasive myths about a “war” between black men and black women. He ends with a sort of self-help list of 12 “hard truths” (some profound, some superfluous)—e.g., “Don’t expect competence and hard work alone to get you the recognition or rewards you deserve.”
A slender volume with a substantial and significant message.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-7434-2715-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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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