Provocative, especially in this election year, though unlikely to sway doctrinaire members of the reigning party.
A free market, purely capitalist in nature? It doesn’t exist—not in this country, anyway, despite right-wing claims to the contrary.
So argue Hacker and Pierson (co-authors: Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, 2010, etc.), political scientists at Yale and Berkeley, respectively. Elaborated at length, their thesis is simple: America’s economy and its economic success owes to its mixed nature, blending private enterprise “in producing and allocating goods and innovating to meet consumer demand” with government investment in infrastructure, education, and other areas. Most advanced economies show a similar mix, with the state ideally ensuring that the “invisible hand” winds up on the right lever. Even Adam Smith, write the authors, recognized that so-called rational actors can act to the detriment of the whole when they pursue their self-interests. Yet the current and dominant political mode, courtesy of such agents as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the brothers Koch, is the demand to remove the government from the mix or, better, to use government as a piggy bank to loot without government being able to influence the direction of the market or curb the self-interests of those rational actors. Hacker and Pierson offer a depressing series of case studies to that end—for instance, food industry efforts to fight the Obama administration’s anti-obesity campaign and the rise of private schools, little better than diploma mills, whose outcomes are worse than those of public counterparts but whose owners still manage to receive ample federal funds. The costs of this private looting to the public are not merely economic; write the authors, “in undermining essential public authority, they threaten effective democratic governance itself.” They suggest reforms to curb the worst effects of the libertarian grab, including “rebuilding government capacity” and remaking Senate filibuster requirements so that the system is more “majoritarian.”
Provocative, especially in this election year, though unlikely to sway doctrinaire members of the reigning party.Pub Date: March 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6782-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
