Robinson (English/University of San Diego; Comic Moments, 1992, etc.—not reviewed) traces the cultural significance of the bowler hat from 1850 to the present—in a study as lighthearted and charming as its subject. Having asked, ``Why did Samuel Beckett specify that the four major characters of Waiting for Godot wear bowler hats?,'' in a 1986 TriQuarterly article, Robinson was moved to expand his inquiry to book length, studying modern life through the evolving meanings of this item of fashion that combines—symbolically and literally- -both lightness and weight. Following the history of the bowler ``as though a wind were blowing it just beyond [my] reach,'' Robinson tells of the hat's debut, in 1850 London, where its combination of style and function satisfied Victorian England's obsession with the practical and the correct. The bowler soon passed from informal use among the aristocracy into a badge of respectability by the upwardly mobile middle class, eventually inspiring Chaplin to use it in his parody of the earnest ``little man.'' As 20th-century life brought new strains of malaise, the bowler became a symbol of mass-produced anonymity in Magritte's paintings; of grim soullessness in the works of Anton Raderscheidt and Georg Grosz; and, finally, in Germany, of Jewish greed and evil. By 1948, when Beckett began writing Godot, the bowler had come to stand for an immutable social identity. It has since settled into the relative obscurity of costume wear, resurfacing only occasionally—e.g., as Oddjob's weapon in Goldfinger and an erotic toy in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Yet the bowler continues to ``[express] its history precisely as it floats past it,'' Robinson concludes, until it becomes a pure design object that can adapt to anything—and ``the dream of the modern will be realized, in at least one small object, at the end of the modern age.'' A tip of the hat to this playful yet thought-provoking work. (Fifty-two illustrations)
Pub Date: April 16, 1993
ISBN: 0-8078-2073-3
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
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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