An intimate, poignant look at life at the margins of society.
Isolated lives shine from dark landscapes.
After his father suffered a heart attack in 2014, journalist Sharlet (English and Creative Writing/Dartmouth Coll.; Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, and Other Essays on American Belief, 2014, etc.) traveled from his home on the Vermont/New Hampshire border to his father’s home in Schenectady, usually at night. “It seemed easier,” he writes, “the steep twisting road more likely to belong to me alone; the radio, when I could find a station, less clogged with news and yet more alive with voices. Night shift voices” that revealed “other people’s nightmares and dreams, projected onto the black night-glass of the car windows.” When he stopped for gas, food, or just to rest, he took snapshots, which he posted on Instagram along with moving narratives about the people he met during those interludes. Travels to Los Angeles, Nairobi, Russia, and Ireland yielded additional portraits of vulnerable “night shift voices,” individuals “around whom the veil of the world is very thin.” One of the longer pieces focuses on 61-year-old Mary Mazur, a disabled woman whose closest companion is a potted plant, which she carries with her when she forays out of her motel room, near midnight, to buy a Thanksgiving turkey. A mother at 19, her three children were taken from her around 1982, when she herself entered the social services system. Now, lonely and wheelchair-bound, she exclaims, “I’m not like everybody else!” Neither is Jared Miller, a “sweet soul” who started abusing drugs in the military and died of an overdose six months after Sharlet met him; or Charley Keunang, a homeless man in his 40s, killed by a police officer who claimed he reached for a gun—a claim contradicted by body-cam footage. Charley immigrated to the U.S. from Cameroon hoping to be an actor, got involved in a robbery, served 14 years in federal prison, and ended up on skid row. Gentle, dignified, and respectful, Charley was “one black life that mattered, no more or less than any other.”
An intimate, poignant look at life at the margins of society.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-32-400320-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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
© 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.
