The abundance of high-quality material makes the book hard to put down. While it focuses on Latina experiences, the...
This aptly named collection of essays lives up to its title, a reference to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s quote that a “wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
Don’t be put off by the subtitle, which suggests dry academic reading; these personal essays are full of learning and life. Contributors from different backgrounds and generations, including Sandra Cisneros, Ruth Behar, Joy Castro and Iris Gomez, preside over these pages with a wide range of concerns, including alienation, isolation and sexuality. In her introduction, essayist De Leon, a Boston schoolteacher, sets the tone with a tribute to her mother, a housekeeper from Guatemala who worked tirelessly to be sure her daughters went to college. Indeed, one of the common threads in the book is the idea of parental sacrifice for the betterment of children. The flip side can be a sense of loss and alienation that comes from opening up cultural gaps within families. In “Stories She Told Us,” Daisy Hernández tries to bridge the chasm between what she learns in the classroom and the hardships faced by her mother, who came to America from Colombia. She shares feminist ideas with her mother, thinking this knowledge will save her; eventually, however, she realizes, “[a]ll the things I’m trying to tell her, have been trying to teach her about, all these things that I needed words for, my mother already knows.” Julia Alvarez, whose family fled the Dominican Republic under political duress, writes of her early academic alienation in America, when what was taught and how she was supposed to learn did not include “my ways of perceiving and moving in the world.” In the wonderfully imaginative “WhiteGirlColorlessAfriPana,” Gail M. Dottin ponders identity in a funny/sad/philosophic dialogue with herself.
The abundance of high-quality material makes the book hard to put down. While it focuses on Latina experiences, the emotional truths these writers express have a broader resonance.Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8032-4593-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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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