A thoughtful book that encourages dialogue between young people on both sides of the issue.
Can the rising generations overcome their parents’ prejudices and bring peace to Israel and Palestine?
It’s not out of the question, writes journalist Miller, a veteran of the Seeds of Peace program in which Israeli, Palestinian and Egyptian youth come together at a Maine summer camp. Miller, who witnessed the signing of the Oslo Treaty, in which her father, a U.S. State Department negotiator, played a role, says of her family legacy: “The joke among my friends is that Middle East peace is the Miller family business.” To judge by this account, the family business is in very good hands indeed, for Miller is an admirably evenhanded chronicler of events that she goes on to witness in Israel and Palestine. She is blessed with a sense of irony, too; one of the places in which Palestinians air their aspirations is an American fast-food restaurant in Ramallah, “happily munching their hamburgers” even as the more militant of the youngsters insist that women are not capable of holding power, let alone driving a car. The Arab community has much to aspire to, Miller writes, for it is truly oppressed; yet, she adds, “It is difficult to determine how much of the Arab community’s second-class status is due to its internal conflicts and corruption and how much is due to governmental discrimination.” Corruption is all around, as are evidences of that discrimination; when Jewish Israelis protest, for one, the cops don’t shoot them down, whereas, one policeman said, at Arab Israeli demonstrations the orders are “shoot to hit.” Miller’s Israeli subjects aspire to peace, too, but must wrestle with the dilemma one of them poses: If the Palestinians are enfranchised, Israel may disappear; therefore, there is no hope of a united, bi-national state, hard though that may be for proponents of a Greater Israel to accept.
A thoughtful book that encourages dialogue between young people on both sides of the issue.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-46924-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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
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