Although a bit dry in spots, Adamson’s crafty enthusiasm is infectious.
The impact and significance of the objects we shape and live with.
Adamson (Senior Scholar/Yale Center for British Art; The Invention of Craft, 2013, etc.) writes that “we are in danger of falling out of touch, not only with objects, but with the intelligence they embody: the empathy that is bound up in tangible things.” He takes us on a winding, personal tour of material intelligence, the world of things; sadly, “our collective material intelligence has steadily plummeted.” The author seeks to paint a “full, kaleidoscopic picture of material experience. Making things, using them, and learning about them.” The book is rich with examples and stories of objects and their makers. Early on, Adamson invites us to take the “Paper Challenge”: What is the best way to evenly divide a piece of paper? He also asks why the materiality of stuffed animals is significant, and he writes in awe about how experts split diamonds and the importance of tools. A fretsaw, a laser cutter, a Jacquard loom—all are “repositories of accumulated material intelligence.” Adamson discusses the importance of touch in making and appreciating things. A visit to Brussels Musical Instruments Museum teaches us how to navigate the displays with our ears as well as our eyes. The author also provides brief history lessons on plywood, aluminum, vulcanized rubber, linoleum, and how a material “rises into fashion, falls out of fashion, then rises again.” He introduces us to many fascinating people and their achievements: “one of America’s greatest basket makers” Dorothy Gill Barnes; master woodcarver David Esterly; Ian Hutchings, who’s “interested in what happens when things rub up against one another;” Murage Ngani Ngatho, master coconut carver; and Constance Adams, a “space architect” for NASA. Interested in footwear? Belgian design researcher Catherine Willems combines “ancient wisdom with new technologies” studying sandals made with reindeer, buffalo, and antelope skin.
Although a bit dry in spots, Adamson’s crafty enthusiasm is infectious.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63286-964-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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