Courageous on-site reporting underlies all, outweighing some excess and irrelevance.
A contributing editor for Vice delivers on-the-scene, first-person accounts of the Western standoffs involving the Bundy family and their followers.
Pogue, a freelancer for the New York Times Magazine at the time, takes us with him inside the armed camp of those who were protesting the Bureau of Land Management—and the government in general—during the confrontations with the feds in Oregon early in 2016. He met and interviewed the Bundys, became close with a number of those encamped at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and felt his emotions ebb and flow, darken and lighten. A young man from Cincinnati, the author does not ignore his own youthful passions and weaknesses, including accounts of his drinking, drug use, sexual adventures, lassitude, and wanderlust. But he is interested principally in understanding the players in the movement led by the charismatic Ammon Bundy. Some, says Pogue, considered Bundy a prophet (many involved were Mormons), and the author is deeply sympathetic to the notion of increasing public access to public lands. He describes one experience, walking around a New Mexico site, camping, drinking, and firing his gun. (He had bought a big truck and some firearms and confesses a long fondness for both.) Pogue does allow some of his stories to drift past the point of interest, and throughout, he criticizes liberals who, in his view, don’t get what’s going on in the West but nonetheless, in ignorance, disdain it all. He also blasts—again and again—what he sees as the blindness of many Westerners who do not recognize the white male power that lies quietly behind so many of these issues. If public lands are sold off and used for mining and other endeavors, who will benefit? And who will suffer?
Courageous on-site reporting underlies all, outweighing some excess and irrelevance.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-16912-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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