The many fragmented individual stories tend to blur together, but the message comes through loud and clear.
The lives of nine families just barely scraping by in four New York City neighborhoods.
Puerto Ricans in Sunset Park, Dominicans in Washington Heights, African-Americans in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, they all fall into the authors’ “missing class”: the 57-million Americans (one fifth of the population) living just above the truly poor but below the middle class. Newman (Sociology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.; A Different Shade of Gray: Mid-Life and Beyond in the Inner City, 2003, etc.) and Chen (editor of INTHEFRAY Magazine) got to know these families and their neighborhoods well between 1995 to 2002. Assisted by a fieldwork research team, they interviewed employers, teachers, community leaders, police and various service providers in addition to the family members themselves. What characterizes the missing class, the authors conclude, is precariousness: a single incident, such as the loss of a job, an accident, illness or divorce, can plunge its members downward into poverty. They work hard, sometimes holding down two jobs, but they don’t have bank accounts, don’t own their homes and have little or no health insurance. Most run continuous balances on their credit cards, paying high interest rates and large fees. They lack the time to supervise their children and are often saddled with the additional responsibility of poverty-stricken relatives who ask for money or move in. In nearly overwhelming detail, Newman and Chen create a grim picture of what life is like without a safety net. These “forgotten but vital” Americans deserve respect for what they have already accomplished, the authors assert, and they need society’s support in housing, education, health care and job training if they are to keep hold of the gains they have made. The concluding chapter examines specific strategies for facilitating home and car ownership, encouraging savings, bringing grocery stores to underserved neighborhoods, reducing school dropout rates and making college accessible and affordable.
The many fragmented individual stories tend to blur together, but the message comes through loud and clear.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4139-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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