An early speculative essay by the author of Out of Africa, stretched into a book with extensive notes and long essays serving as both foreward and afterword. Divorced, out of Africa, and not yet begun on her literary career, Dinesen writes with intellectual detachment on the redemptive power of idealism—whether in free love, marriage, or social planning. To Dinesen, marriage is an example of the persistence of words and the mutability of meaning. The greatest sin of modern marriage is its "terrible lack of idealism," its dedication not to love or the loved one but to orthodoxy, to itself, to the name of marriage. So, like St. Christopher, Dinesen's model, the strong individual must seek out something stronger to serve. Of course, all her notions are predicated upon a godless world in which piety is reactionary, so St. Christopher's solution is no good. The new ideal strong enough to deserve service is, unfortunately, eugenics. She correctly sees birth control as epochal, but not as liberation of women's sexuality so much as a means of improving the species. Her faith in eugenics is not cold-she even speculates that science may show that children conceived in love may be the strongest. Still, to modern ears, the language of eugenics is chilling: ". . .free love affairs will be tolerated as long as they do not burden the race with undesirable specimens." The introductory essay provides a general biography and puts the essay in context both of her life and her times, arguing the essential feminism of Dinesen's writings. The afterword examines the influence of George Bernard Shaw, and the meaning of neo-Lamarckism and eugenics to that era. Both ably serve to untangle what is, after all, a rather confusing piece of philosophy.
Pub Date: Nov. 28, 1986
ISBN: 0312010745
Page Count: 134
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1986
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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