A successful effort to humanize the devastating effects of poverty by presenting case histories of the poor, from neonatal crisis to nursing-home holding pattern. According to Pulitzer-winning journalist Freedman, more than 37 million Americans live below the poverty line—the highest number since the late 60's, when the Great Society programs kicked in. At that point, senior citizens suffered twice the poverty rate of children—but since then, seniors have gained and children have lost. To combat poverty, Freedman advocates government programs from womb to tomb, from prenatal care that will offset the staggering cost of treating crack babies to hospice care that will ease dying. But he sees government dollars as building a railing, not a safety net—a railing that will lend support to people trying to climb out of poverty. Freedman builds his case with stories of success and failure from every stage of life: Kenya Williams lost her first baby because of her crack addiction; her second child was born healthy and strong because of a drug-treatment program that cost $60 a day. Meanwhile, keeping Cindy Miller's premature son alive in a neonatal unit cost $2,000 a day, using up a lifetime of health insurance and driving the middle-class Millers (both of whom worked) to the edge of bankruptcy. And so on through the life span, with tales of abuse, teenage pregnancy, deadbeat dads, unemployment, and dying. Freedman offers a number of concrete suggestions to help those struggling out of poverty, including a children's trust fund subsidized by estate taxes (one generation helping another), and payroll deductions for child support. An eloquent plea that creative help to the ``have-nots'' will save money in the long run—but, sadly, unlikely to change the powerful agendas of the ``haves.''
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-689-12126-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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