Extremely impressive research informs this valuable book of American history.
A veteran journalist who has published copiously about the vice presidency offers an exhaustive survey.
Syndicated politics columnist Witcover (Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption, 2010, etc.) relates the saga of all 47 vice presidents of the United States, from John Adams to Joe Biden. Although biographical information is abundant for each man, the author emphasizes the political context of each vice presidency, showing how each vice president became the nominee, whether each worked well in tandem with the president, and what happened to each when the four-year term expired. Only readers who have studied the White House in depth are likely to recognize names such as William R. King, Garret A. Hobart and Charles Curtis. Witcover explains why most vice presidents, despite impressive accomplishments before election, served their terms in near obscurity. The inattention of the Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives and the courts regarding sensible selection and succession procedures seems shocking when understood within the historical timeline Witcover presents. At first, the vice president was the runner-up in the election for president, meaning incompatible rivals might be thrown together. Later, tradition dictated the president and the vice president be from the same political party, but the line of succession remained unclear. In one of the most surprising chapters, Witcover examines the confusion in the mind of Thomas R. Marshall during the extended, mostly undisclosed incapacity of President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson's wife and the medical staff refused to keep Marshall in the loop, despite the strong possibility that Marshall would become president. Not until 1967, with the adoption of the 25th Amendment, did the procedure for filling a vacant presidency become completely clear. That amendment became operative only six years later, when the disgraced Richard Nixon chose Gerald Ford as the new president. In a final chapter, Witcover looks back on the evolution of the vice presidency to surmise that it now can probably be considered an "assistant presidency" rather than a do-nothing sinecure.
Extremely impressive research informs this valuable book of American history.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-58834-471-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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