Mostly fascinating, lively writings on a spectrum of topics relevant to women and men with a literary bent.
Of-the-moment essays about popular culture, literature and the author's unconventional life.
Critic and novelist Roiphe (Journalism/New York Univ.; Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910–1939, 2007, etc.) presents a collection of personal essays and cultural and literary criticism, most of which have been previously published in Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review and other venues. The book's title is adapted from the headline of the author’s New York Times article, "The Allure of Messy Lives," which unpacks the hedonistic appeal of the TV show Mad Men and current cultural obsession with healthiness and productivity. “Perhaps part of what is so appealing, so fascinating about [the show],” she writes, “is the flight from bourgeois ordinariness, the struggle against it, in all of its poetic and mundane forms.” In a different essay, Roiphe describes her single motherhood and the pervasive negative judgment she perceives as existing toward women who choose to have children on their own. The book is divided into four sections: "Life and Times," essays about her life; "Books," pieces of literary criticism; "The Way We Live Now," cultural writing; and "The Internet, Etc.," personal essays offering scathing critiques of the "angry Internet commenter" and sites such as Gawker. Roiphe's searing polemics are notorious for sparking controversy and sometimes drawing ire, and certain pieces included here are sure to do the same. In one essay, she argues that "incest has become our latest literary vogue”; in another, she bemoans the sex scenes written by the "Great Male Novelists of the last century." Whether readers agree with her opinions or not, Roiphe is a fine, serious writer. Her essays are surprising, interesting and sharp and occasionally fall somewhere between thought-provoking and downright aggravating, but her voice is confident and consistent.
Mostly fascinating, lively writings on a spectrum of topics relevant to women and men with a literary bent.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9282-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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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