Vivid confirmation of the arrival of a major chronicler of those who live on or beyond the margins of the American...
A dozen unforgettable reports from the underbelly of American life, from Vanity Fair contributing editor Wright (Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War, 2004).
Shunning the “gonzo journalism” tag associated with the late Hunter S. Thompson, Wright notes that his work “has always been to focus on my subjects in all their imperfect glory.” Well, almost: Two essays deal with Wright’s adventures a decade ago in the pornography industry, at Hustler and at Internet Entertainment Group, where he worked for Seth Warshavsky, “the first and greatest con artist of the digital era.” That background, along with his past struggles with drugs and alcohol, dissolves some of the traditional distance between reporter and subject. Whether covering skateboarders, Seattle anti-globalism protestors and ecoterrorists, neo-Nazis or peddlers of human-growth hormone, Wright investigates what he calls “rejectionists” of the American Dream without romanticizing or condescending. He may not approach these outsiders and misfits with the kind of raffish affection displayed by legendary New Yorker nonfiction chroniclers Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling, but Wright’s reports are every bit as memorable. His Mötley Crüe profile depicts the heavy-metal group as more cretinous than the fictional Spinal Tap. The quotes are frequently profane and virtually always pungent—for example, former Hollywood agent and sometime substance abuser Pat Dollard, ready to start bingeing again, urges the author: “Let’s take ten grand, go to Las Vegas, get a bunch of hookers and blow, and have fun for a few days”—and Wright’s sensory descriptions are searing, as when he evokes the discomfort of American soldiers in Afghanistan: “The first hot winds of the morning bear an overwhelming smell of raw sewage, spiced with the odor of disinfectant from the latrines outside the tent, not to mention occasional gusts of diesel fuel blowing off the line of helicopters on the nearby runway.”
Vivid confirmation of the arrival of a major chronicler of those who live on or beyond the margins of the American mainstream.Pub Date: April 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-15574-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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