A sharp warning to corporations that deep pockets and armies of accomplices won’t stall a reckoning forever.
A savage satirical stab at corporate malfeasance draws blood.
Jacquet, the director of XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement at NYU and author of Is Shame Necessary? takes an original approach to indicting the ethical vacuum that besets much of big business. The author presents a “training” manual for corporate CEOs on how to fight against science, supplant it with disinformation, and undermine all efforts to regulate industry. Jacquet’s well-informed narrative details avoidance and attack strategies so thoroughly that it offers a blueprint (for the uninitiated) for precisely the sort of skulduggery she deplores. However, her juicy rip of corporate culture and the callous disregard that affects us all effectively nails bad actors to the wall. The political climate of the Trump period, especially the surge of climate change denial, prompted Jacquet to study the tactics used by corporations to thwart, corrupt, or discredit scientists. She is a fine reporter, chronicling a history of misdeeds on the parts of not only pharmaceutical, chemical, radium, tobacco, and dozens of other industries, but some ongoing campaigns, all with the evidence to back it up. Refreshingly, she is unafraid to name names. Jacquet likewise exposes the enablers: political hacks, consultants, law firms, pro-business media, trade associations, lobbyists, think tanks, industry-funded “research” groups, PR firms, and phony “grassroots advocates.” Lest the author be accused of shooting fish in a barrel, she also calls out unscrupulous scientists and both the media and academe for their complicity, conscious or otherwise. For all the intermittent crackdowns on conflicts of interest, Jacquet suggests it’s still business as usual. Meanwhile, she exhorts journalists to be tougher and academics to be more circumspect. The author recognizes a few heroes, too, chiefly whistleblowers and those who refuse to succumb to corporate pressure. Her book is extensively annotated and buttressed by a glossary of terms.
A sharp warning to corporations that deep pockets and armies of accomplices won’t stall a reckoning forever.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-101-87101-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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