Shrill, tedious and heavy-handed—even if occasionally funny and often right on the mark.
A grumpy cri de coeur against sensitivity, political correctness, obesity and other hallowed American ideals.
Strausbaugh, who attained nirvanic dyspepsia with Rock ’Til You Drop: The Decline from Rebellion to Nostalgia (2001), is rapidly becoming a garden-variety curmudgeon who’s beginning to sound a lot like someone’s crotchety grandpa—or maybe Andy Rooney. “We’re not just fat, we’re not just lazy, we’re not just conformists, we’re not just narcissists . . . We’re all those things and all the others, rolled up into one big, soft, squishy ball,” he writes, cataloguing what he calls the “Perfect Storm of Sissitude.” He hastens to add, in a PC spasm, that sissy does not equal gay, though he atones at once by characterizing former President Jimmy Carter as someone who “let a bunch of Iranian college students and a bearded lunatic spank him like their bitch on the global stage. God, how humiliating. President Bottom. Nothing against submissives, but who wants one for president?” The rhetoric is about that shallow throughout, and the rest of the book trades in similar gripes against just about anyone who comes along, especially if that anyone is overweight (“Holstein People” is one of Strausbaugh’s nicer epithets). The author’s approach is to aim at the barn and see what boards rattle, and sometimes it works: For one thing, he’s on the money when he links strip clubs, “Starbucks for Sissy sex,” to a fear of sex, death, intimacy and most other realities of life, and he’s also right to consider 9/11 a genuine example of “Shock and Awe,” even if it went a far sight beyond “guerrilla theater.” Strausbaugh then moves on to the softest of targets, academia, takes potshots at all the usual-suspect politicos and sneers at suburbanites—Andy Rooney stuff, in other words, though Rooney hasn’t been heard calling “the clash of Islam versus the West . . . just a tiff between two variations of Sissy fundamentalism.”
Shrill, tedious and heavy-handed—even if occasionally funny and often right on the mark.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-9052-6416-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Virgin Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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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