Every page is a pleasure.
A sparkling collection of features by the Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post columnist.
For readers who come to Weingarten (Old Dogs: Are the Best Dogs, 2008, etc.) for humor, there are plenty of smiles and laughs scattered throughout the uniformly strong pieces assembled here. But the author is about more than grins and giggles. In even the slightest of the essays—seeing his daughter off to college, honoring the memory of his childhood baseball hero—his storytelling, keen observation and deft reporting startle and amaze. Whether profiling cartoonist Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau or The Great Zucchini, a little-known children’s entertainer whose messy personal life belies his talent for beguiling preschoolers, Weingarten reliably delivers the goods. He’s equally adept at exhuming quirky stories of the dead, including that of Leslie McFarlane, who as “Franklin W. Dixon” spent a good portion of his frustrated writing career churning out the Hardy Boys mystery series, Mary Hulbert, who died never disclosing the details of her intimate relationship with Woodrow Wilson; and William Jefferson Blythe, killed in a 1946 car crash, who left behind a pregnant wife whose son would grow up to be President Bill Clinton—neither he nor his mother ever knew about Blythe’s previous two marriages (to sisters!) or of the stepbrother one union produced. Weingarten shines especially when he sets himself a puzzle. Which among this country’s many worthy towns merits the distinction as “The Armpit of America?” What’s it like living daily with terror? Is what’s happening at the bedside of a brain-dead girl in Worcester, Mass., a miracle or a hustle? If you pick a place on the map and travel there, will you find a good story? So we journey with him to blighted Battle Mountain, Nev.; ponder communion wafers that allegedly contain blood and icons that weep oil; explore Savoonga, the Bering Sea island where the native Yupiks weather a teen-suicide epidemic; and watch world-class violinist Joshua Bell playing in a train station before thousands of mostly oblivious commuters.
Every page is a pleasure.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8159-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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
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