A provocative book that will make readers more aware of terrible things done in their names.
A probing investigation of the morally ambiguous tasks that are done with our tacit consent.
Press opens by recounting the story of sociologist Everett Hughes, who visited Germany soon after the end of World War II and encountered professionals who, while repudiating Nazism, also quietly noted that there was a “Jewish problem” that simply met the wrong solution. Hughes returned from the conversation with the idea that the Nazis were enabled by an “unconscious mandate” from German society. From this, Press builds a case that enfolds the “dirty work” conducted by our contemporary mandate—not the grimy work of mechanics and garbage collectors, but instead that of drone operators, prison guards and staff, and meat packers. All of these, writes the author, were considered “essential workers” during the pandemic, if low-paid ones and often without health care benefits, paid leave, and protection from the virus. In the case of the slaughterhouse workers—overwhelmingly members of ethnic minorities and often in the country illegally—the plants in which they labored were “ordered to stay open even as scores of laborers died and tens of thousands fell ill.” Slaughterhouses—and prisons and drone facilities—are tucked away in mostly poor, mostly minority communities to keep them from troubling the consciences of the more privileged. Most of these people would rather be doing something else, of course. The prison workers Press profiles, for instance, are inclined to settle their own consciences via liberal self-medication of drugs and alcohol, and they suffer suicide rates far higher than those in the general population. All this dirty work, Press writes, is enabled by “passive democrats” who are perfectly content not to know about the unpleasant details of jobs done on their behalf. He closes his account, meaningfully, with a ceremony at a VA hospital in which soldiers confess their “moral transgressions” while civilians acknowledge, “We share responsibility with you.”
A provocative book that will make readers more aware of terrible things done in their names.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-14018-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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