A personal, straightforward appeal for action on gun violence that the NRA will certainly shoot down.
Former Congresswoman Giffords, who survived a mass shooting in 2011, and her husband, former astronaut Kelly (Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope, 2011), argue forcefully that gun owners and gun control advocates alike can work toward common-sense policies that address gun violence in this country.
Proud gun owners who believe in the Second Amendment, the authors have launched Americans for Responsible Solutions, an organization dedicated to changing policies on such issues as background checks, assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and gun traffic. The narrator’s voice is Kelly’s, and he shares some surprising facts about gun laws in the Old West, tells the story of Giffords’ near-fatal shooting outside a Tucson supermarket in 2011 and provides some revealing statistics on gun ownership. His take on the National Rifle Association is fierce. He recounts how the organization evolved from a small group intent on promoting marksmanship to a powerful, even fearsome, lobbying force in both state and national politics. In reporting on the NRA’s close relationship with the firearms industry, Kelly notes that not only does the NRA receive substantial financial support from the industry, but it also wields considerable power over gun manufacturers. When Smith & Wesson agreed to some basic safety measures in 2000, the NRA’s boycott cost the company dearly—a 40 percent drop in sales and the closure of two factories. The balance of the book focuses on unsuccessful efforts in 2012 to persuade the U.S. Senate to pass the Manchin-Toomey bill, which would have changed the law on background checks. As Giffords and Kelly continue their work on reforming gun laws at state and local levels, the authors are optimistic that reasonable people will come to agree that while gun owners have specific rights, they have equally important responsibilities as well.
A personal, straightforward appeal for action on gun violence that the NRA will certainly shoot down.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476750071
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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