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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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