A largely detached observer offers a series of digestible, timely assessments of the U.S.
Astute observations about both the expanse of American "civilization" and the dilution of its "exceptionalism."
The United States has always been subject to scrutiny and criticism, from de Tocqueville to Borat, and Castañeda—the global professor of political science and Latin American studies at NYU who served as the foreign minister of Mexico from 2000 to 2003—is a rather avuncular critic of many aspects of American society. Via his meandering notes on the middle class, humor, "dysfunctional" democracy, racial issues, and other topics, he provides mostly valuable and useful analysis. Interestingly, he counters some of the usual, often heard criticism from Europeans and Latin Americans about the American "sameness," uniformity, and homogeneity, examining in comparative graphs the rise of the middle class. While it was, on one hand, the envy of the world—cars, TVs, and other gadgets in every household—it masked the "underlying diversity" that made up the country and largely excluded significant populations of blacks, Natives, and Latinos. The relative equality of income distribution peaked in the late 1960s and has grown increasingly unequal since. Castañeda also examines the country's much-vaunted (and highly problematic) systems of meritocracy and expectation of social mobility—and how the latter trend has declined below the levels of many European countries. The other "defining trait" of America—after uniformity and obsession with money—is "exceptionalism,” a myth that the author explodes, quoting Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes: “The United States has been the bearer of a nationalism as aggressive and self-celebratory as any European imperial power.” In the last, hard-hitting chapter, "The Unforgivable," Castañeda explores how America's grand Enlightenment ideals have been trampled by a “breach of contract with liberalism and tolerance” in terms of “mass incarceration, the death penalty, guns, and intelligent design.”
A largely detached observer offers a series of digestible, timely assessments of the U.S.Pub Date: July 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-022449-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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