A convincing argument that becoming resilient is not only possible, but essential; food for thought for all and especially...
A revealing examination of the anatomy of resilience, the capacity to withstand and emerge stronger from acute shocks and chronic stresses.
Rodin, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, which launched the 100 Resilient Cities project in 2013, explains why resilience matters and analyzes its components: awareness of assets, liabilities and vulnerabilities; diversity of sources of capacity; integration of functions and actions; the ability to self-regulate; and the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. Firmly convinced that resilience can be learned, Rodin demonstrates how to build it and how it works through an array of stories from around the world. She shows how the disruptive factors of climate change, urbanization and globalization intertwine and how resilience can withstand these threats. Her stories explore the three phases of resilience—readiness, responsiveness and revitalization—and describe the resilience dividend, the ability to build new relationships, seize new opportunities and take on new endeavors. Many of her examples involve natural disasters: the earthquake and fire in San Francisco in 1906, the tsunami at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, and hurricanes Katrina in New Orleans and Sandy in New York. Rodin also looks at the Boston Marathon bombing, as well as crime and poverty in Medellín, Colombia. That story shows how Medellín, once considered the murder capital of the world and now on the Rockefeller list of 100 Resilient Cities, is successfully addressing its problems and moving forward. The author focuses not just on the thinking and actions of various government agencies, but on the efforts of communities, civic groups, businesses, individuals, clubs and other organizations and the tools and technologies that were employed. She clearly shows what went right and what went wrong and what can be learned from past experiences.
A convincing argument that becoming resilient is not only possible, but essential; food for thought for all and especially recommended for community leaders.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1610394703
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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