Smoothly written if not penetrating account of how an exceptional chief executive enlarged the presidency in a period of intense national growth and change; by Clements (History/Univ. of South Carolina). Detailed and balanced, this study makes clear Wilson's grasp of his times and his capacity for convincing other Americans of his rightness. Clements traces that sense of rightness back to a family full of practical southern Protestant ministers, believers in service—a notion Wilson expanded to connect religion with patriotism. The result was a can-do leader in domestic affairs, an extremely gifted politician able to work deals, compromise, and create respect in Congress, which by and large cooperated in a reformist agenda that created the Federal Reserve, took steps to deal with social effects of industrialization, reduced the tariff, created the income tax to replace those lost revenues, and tightened government control of business, beginning with child labor laws. But the orderly progression and style of this book do not suggest the scope of Wilson's vision, his passion, his moral stance, and how these enabled him to powerfully sway Americans, if not Europeans. The other players are a bit lifeless as well, which leads to an impersonal, sanitized study. Wilson the man was deeper, craftier, more complex, and more driven than seen here, and his leadership cannot be separated from these qualities. The harrowing failure at Versailles, the death-struggle over the League of Nations with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and Wilson's final, driving, self-destructive effort to impose his will on an America eager for Harding's ``normalcy''—all deserve deeper scrutiny and analysis. The tragic denouement following his stroke—the ``stewardship'' by Mrs. Wilson and Col. House—is as murky as ever, except in its implications regarding transfer of power in such a crisis, insufficiently explored here. A finely detailed, almost too specialized, and nonjudgmental account, not very urgent or thought-provoking.
Pub Date: March 15, 1992
ISBN: 0-7006-0523-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kansas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
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
SEEN & HEARD
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