Goldsmith outlines a future that perhaps offers a hope we can embrace, since a retreat seems impossible.
A persuasive argument about how what conventional wisdom dismisses as “wasting time” is actually time well spent.
A conceptual artist and the first poet laureate of the Museum of Modern Art, Goldsmith (Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century, 2015, etc.) saw his vision go viral when he launched a course with the same name as this book at the University of Pennsylvania. “This class will focus on the alchemical recuperation of aimless surfing into substantial works of literature,” he hyperbolized within the course description, which concluded, “distraction, multitasking, and aimless drifting is mandatory.” A tweet that linked to that description led to requests for national interviews, and “what ensued was a media feeding frenzy, which ended up consuming itself.” He quickly had more than 300 students clamoring to take a course with a capacity of 15. As for the course itself, “From the start, it was a disaster….I had never seen a group of students as demoralized as these. Clearly, my experiment was failing.” Well, yes and no, because for a course designed without focus, the students had to discover the process on their own and proceed through uncharted territory. Much like the experience of surfing the web, the book doesn’t attempt to provide a cohesive analysis but instead leaps from this intuition to that epiphany and is willing to risk some false starts and even to waste some time along the way. Goldsmith suggests that long before information shifted into digital overdrive, thinkers and artists recognized the crucial role that letting the mind wander plays in creativity. The author finds the surrealists in general and Joseph Cornell in particular to be attuned to the spirit of the internet to come, that “his varied artistic output could be called multimedia some seventy-five years before it become the digital norm.” The disconnection that others bemoan from digital technology strikes the author as heightened communication.
Goldsmith outlines a future that perhaps offers a hope we can embrace, since a retreat seems impossible.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-241647-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
PROFILES
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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