Vitriolic, bilious, venomous, and a lot of fun. Until, that is, you realize Vidal’s not kidding.
America’s favorite contrarian waxes wroth and righteous blustery in this gathering of new and recycled aperçus concerning elections past and present.
Since 1972, Vidal (Dreaming War, 2003, etc.) has been delivering alternative State of the Union addresses, a practice first begun on the old David Susskind Show and continued to the present. (Of Susskind, Vidal writes, “He was commercially successful; he was also, surprisingly, a man of strong political views which he knew how to present so tactfully that the networks were often unaware of just what he was getting away with on their—our—air.”) In those days, Vidal had Dick Nixon to pick on, and then Reagan and the Bushes and even Clinton, which allows him to make trendspotting pronouncements with his customary bite: “Republicans are often stupider and more doctrinaire than the Democrats, who are cuter, a bit more corrupt (sigh of relief), but willing to make small—very small—adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists [are concerned].” No one quite exercises Vidal so much as George W. Bush, who presides over an administration that he deems a “reckless junta,” “nakedly predatory,” and all around bad news. Vidal is deeply irritated at most of what Bush and company do, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has read him before. He casts a wider net with some of his most recent ex cathedras, though, as when he notes that the head of the Diebold Corp., which makes voting machines, wrote a fundraising letter for the GOP in 2003 promising that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” That is hardly the impartiality one would hope for from a man in his position, but no surprise to Mr. Vidal, who merrily intones, “Sooner or later, wherever mischief lurks”—and vote-rigging is a species of the higher mischief, as far as politics goes—“a member of the Bush family can be observed on the premises.”
Vitriolic, bilious, venomous, and a lot of fun. Until, that is, you realize Vidal’s not kidding.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56025-585-4
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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
SEEN & HEARD
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