America, Mahbubani urges, needs to give up its insularity and start caring about what the world thinks, and about living up...
Why does the world hate America so?
Because, remark several of the many interlocutors to be found here, the US has lost any moral authority it might have once had. Parts of the world came to that conclusion early on; whereas, observes Mahbubani, former Singaporean ambassador to the UN, a 19th-century Saudi citizen (never mind that there was no such thing) would not have dreamed of traveling to Afghanistan to battle the British—“He would have probably replied: ‘But the Afghans are not even Arabs!’ ”—Saudis now flock to battle America, the great Satan of the mullahs’ rhetoric. Americans don’t try to understand Islamic anger against them, and so “it comes as a shock to most American citizens to be told that their government may have, knowingly or not, radicalized Islam.” Other parts of the world are recent converts to anti-Americanism; much of the slide in the standing of the US in Europe can be traced to Iraq, while one of Mahbubani’s Chinese respondents finds that moment in the US treatment of Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners: “We Chinese have discovered that Americans are not really different from us. We thought they were special. Now we know they are just like us.” Such discoveries will be a comedown for many American readers, but Mahbubani’s chidings are well placed. Who would want to live in a village in which 4 percent of the inhabitants create 25 percent of the pollution? Who would want a neighbor who insists that it’s up to him alone to define what “neighbor” means? Who could not despise a nation that, by going to war without UN backing, “tore a hole in the very consensus that had been an American gift to the world”?
America, Mahbubani urges, needs to give up its insularity and start caring about what the world thinks, and about living up to its promise. Its leaders would surely benefit from reading Beyond the Age of Innocence—but fat chance, so get ready for more hatred to come.Pub Date: March 30, 2005
ISBN: 1-58648-268-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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