A disheartening yet engaging, urgent report from the front lines of social decline.
A mournful exploration of the connections between food and community, set against the ravages experienced by the marginalized.
In her debut book, Foster, a James Beard Award–winning writer, details her family’s experiences after moving to Las Vegas to facilitate her husband’s work as a show producer. As she became attuned to the city’s bleak undertow of addiction and poverty, she tried to counter it with a passion for cooking and sharing, beginning with their meth-addicted handyman, Charlie, whom she invited for lunch daily until his decline prevented such gestures. “In just three months,” she writes, “we have seen Charlie and [his wife] Tessie through a lifetime of crises—temporary sobriety, meth binges, two stints in jail, three moves, one eviction, [and] several religious, end-of-the-world texts.” These caring instincts drove her to first foster and then adopt two severely traumatized children. They also started an at-home food pantry for the needy during the pandemic: “Trauma food is what I’m trying to provide.” Foster engages subtopics including the plight of the unhoused and the mentally ill, with the backdrop of the city’s ruthless service economy and the exploitative nature of low-end housing. The author’s deepening connections to the troubled individuals she encountered highlight both her empathy and frustration. Throughout, she contrasts her sensual, detailed depictions of food and the satisfactions inherent in the private act of cooking and collective solutions like food pantries and foster parenting with the intractably grim circumstances of those she befriends and assists. Foster writes sensitively, with percussive and observant prose, portraying herself as well meaning yet also conscious of her status. “Words like heirloom, organic, localmay exude certain privileges,” she writes, “but the joy of food is not a privilege.” Despite relishing the benefits of the hard labor of building social capital, her outlook remains hobbled by reality: “Poverty is a policy choice. We have poverty because we choose to have it.”
A disheartening yet engaging, urgent report from the front lines of social decline.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781250278777
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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