Light and fun.
Confessed scandal fan Kipnis (Radio-TV-Film/Northwestern Univ.; The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability, 2006, etc.) picks through the mortifying carnage of other people’s lives, exploring why we both relish and condemn bad behavior.
Divided in two parts, “Downfalls” and “Uproars,” this slight and easy-to-digest book covers four major popular-culture scandals of the last two decades. These include those of love-crazed, diaper-wearing astronaut Lisa Nowak; the dishonorable judge Sol Wachtler; whistle-blower Linda Tripp; and the “over-imaginative,” so-called memoirist James Frey. In the introduction, the author writes that “[b]ecoming a scandal is pretty much a piece of cake, especially these days. You don’t even have to leave the house to wreck your life anymore.” While it’s true that unwittingly vulnerable or gossipy e-mails can be forwarded to thousands of people, Kipnis asks if such an occurrence could ever be classified as an accident. What if, she wonders, the heart of scandal is self-sabotage? “Needless to say,” she writes, “lust has always been scandal’s greatest pal…[and] failed self-knowledge is scandal’s favorite theme.” Though the author is no sociologist, she is a highly entertaining writer who, at her best, crackles with witty one-liners (“Nowak’s feelings were just too incontinent: she was the quintessential leaky vessel”). One of the more interesting parts of her analysis concerns what psychoanalyst Theodor Reik called “the compulsion to confess.” It’s hard to deny that society has been saturated with spoken secrets, from reality television to therapy groups, and Kipnis hones in on the masochistic aspect of this vulnerability. She doesn’t go beyond a superficial exploration—or ever reveal anything remotely embarrassing about herself—but she does raise a few plum questions.
Light and fun.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8979-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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
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