Undoubtedly creepy and unnerving but also an entirely compelling slice of seamy American life.
The disturbing private world of the sleaziest motel manager since Norman Bates.
The latest book by new journalism pioneer Talese (A Writer’s Life, 2006, etc.) is the story of the author's decadeslong correspondence with Colorado businessman Gerald Foos, an unashamed peeping Tom who spent years spying on clients at his roadside motel. From the attic over a room structurally fitted with a fake ceiling vent, Foos watched—and recorded, in a series of journals—the private lives of his guests, writing up (and often masturbating over) graphic accounts of the couplings of horny singles, adulterous professionals, threesomes, lesbians, widows with paid escorts, incestuous siblings, and men in costumes, among many others. He also saw lots of bored married couples watching TV. Foos views himself not just as a voyeur, but as a “pioneering sex researcher,” not unlike Kinsey, Masters, and Johnson—or perhaps Talese himself, whose 1980 Thy Neighbor’s Wife chronicled the sexual revolution from his perspective as both observer and participant. “Someone has to be delegated the responsibility to confront these tangible existences and tell other people about them,” Foos writes in one journal entry. “Herein is the intrinsic essence of the Voyeur.” Foos writes a functional, unfussy prose, which Talese both ably condenses and quotes at generous length. The character that emerges from this tightly woven narrative is oddly ambivalent. At some level, he's a little like Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet, indulging this purely human desire to see what has always been hidden. But spying also fed Foos’ ego and allowed him to exert power over his guests, who became lab rats for both his obsessions and his power trips. Most disturbingly, he recalls how he once interceded in the life of a guest and inadvertently both caused and witnessed her murder. (The case, investigated at some length, remains shrouded in mystery.)
Undoubtedly creepy and unnerving but also an entirely compelling slice of seamy American life.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2581-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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