A pleasure for those convinced of the present ruling elite’s deep-seated flaws and deeper evils, and tasty food for thought...
Another deliciously ill-tempered screed from veteran gadfly Vidal (Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, p. 398, etc.), perhaps our fiercest homegrown critic of American imperialism in general and the current administration in particular.
In this gathering of pieces from the Nation, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere, Vidal amply reveals just how deeply ticked off he has been by recent developments. The judicial appointment of “the charmingly simian George W. Bush” to run the front office is by now old news, but it proves, Vidal insists, that corporate America is really in charge of the whole show. The failure of American intelligence to foresee the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in his eyes, speaks mostly to the general stupidity of the “oil-and-gas Cheney-Bush junta,” which neglected to pass on to us ordinary citizens mayday warnings that had emanated from “Presidents Putin and Mubarak, from Mossad, and even from elements of our long-suffering FBI.” The weird fact that representatives of the Taliban had toured Texas oil facilities shortly before Osama bin Laden arrived on the scene, evidently with an eye to striking a mutually beneficial deal for a new pipeline across Afghanistan, and the equally weird fact that said Talibanistas had hired a niece of former CIA director Richard Helms to handle their PR, are two more items on the seemingly endless list of things that annoy Vidal. American support for Israel, the death of the old American republic and its replacement, along about 1950, with “the National Security State,” the refusal of mainstream historians to admit the possibility that the Japanese had a point in bombing Pearl Harbor—he enumerates these aggravating items point by point with caressing venom. That Vidal is fonder of sermonizing than logical argument, of assertion rather than cold data, is no matter: this is trademark Goring and unforgiving: woe to its unfortunate target.
A pleasure for those convinced of the present ruling elite’s deep-seated flaws and deeper evils, and tasty food for thought even for the doubtful.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56025-502-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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