When black teenager Yusuf Hawkins was fatally shot on a Brooklyn street one steamy August evening in 1989, his death sent tremors rumbling through New York City. Hawkins and three friends had been attacked by a group of about 30 neighborhood youths in what was clearly a race-related incident. Here, DeSantis, who covered the story for UPI and The Washington Post, presents an engrossing account of the crime, its impact on the black and white communities, and the political and judicial maneuverings that marked the case. Hawkins and his friends were in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, a blue-collar enclave known for its volatile racial climate, to check out a used car for sale. What they were unaware of was that the area had been seething with tension ever since Gina Feliciano, a young neighborhood troublemaker and drug addict, had spread the word that she had invited a group of black and Hispanic friends to her birthday party and that her guests were going ``to kick some white ass.'' Armed with baseball bats, golf clubs, and at least one gun, white Bensonhurst teenagers prepared to protect their turf. Spotting the four blacks, they intercepted them and, after a brief altercation, shots rang out and Hawkins fell to the sidewalk, two bullets in his chest, a half-eaten candy bar in one hand. In recounting the ensuing events—a roundup of suspects, demonstrations and counterdemonstrations, the trials of the principal participants—DeSantis finds little to praise in any of the figures involved. From the Rev. Al Sharpton, eager to restore his image after the disastrous Tawana Brawley case, to Brooklyn D.A. Elizabeth Holtzman, seemingly more intent on her race for the post of city comptroller than in putting together a viable case, the principals became mired in political manipulation. DeSantis handles the tangled skein of his story adroitly, shading in the background with telling details. A fast-paced tale, frightening in its implications.
Pub Date: Nov. 18, 1991
ISBN: 0-88687-621-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1991
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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