Several cuts above standard memoirs.
Humorous, provocative tale of a young black writer racing past personal and historical demons.
In his debut, Walker (English/Bridgewater State Coll.) deftly subverts expectations of urban angst and braggadocio. The author begins on Chicago’s South Side. As a wannabe gangster, Walker learned that his friendly neighborhood cocaine dealer was shot to death an hour after giving him drugs on credit. The author then backtracks from this violent opening to limn his unusual childhood. His parents were both blind, but also followers of a doomsday cult which assured the youthful Walker that the end of the world was near. When this failed to materialize, the nerdy, disillusioned adolescent fell under the sway of his raffish brothers and thuggish neighbors. They all seemed headed down a familiar path of degradation. Somehow, however, Walker always gravitated toward situations that offered opportunities for redemption, despite the temptations of cocaine, alcohol, abusive women and pointless street violence. As an older student at a local community college, Walker received advice from one of his teachers to transfer to the University of Iowa. Once there, he felt baffled by the school’s Midwestern snobbery and, more generally, by race—his encounters with whites and fellow blacks often ended in wounded puzzlement. Walker’s fresh take on the labyrinth of urban race relations is one of his memoir’s great pleasures. “I came to believe, at a very early age,” he writes, “that in order to succeed I would have to beat the system through the mastery of some criminal enterprise, or join it in the form of a Sambo, a sell-out, an Oreo.” After acceptance and acclaim at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Walker got married and became a father, yet continued to fear that success, as both a writer and a black man, would always elude him. The book’s somber concluding chapters, in which he recalls the many companions from his confused youth who are now dead or in jail, clarifies how such fears are entirely warranted.
Several cuts above standard memoirs.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-553-80755-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
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