A hopscotch of scenes, unsatisfying in part because so many powerful story ideas go undeveloped.
The Chickasaw poet and novelist Hogan (Power, 1998) offers a personal and family memoir that is neither poem nor novel, but more like a series of journal entries.
The snippets, as it were, of Hogan’s life are extraordinarily revealing, telling of a relationship with an older man that began—with her parents’ acceptance—when she was only 12, of her years of drunkenness, of the tragic failure to heal the deep psychic scars of her two adopted daughters (love “isn’t always enough,” she notes), of the debilitating pain and sleeplessness caused by her own fibromylagia, of amnesia caused by a fall from a horse. Her story is interwoven with stories of the pain, despair, and anger of Native Americans, and tales of heroes like Ohiyesa (a doctor at Wounded Knee) and Lozen (an Apache woman warrior and healer). And into the tapestry also go threads of reflections on the power of water (“perhaps the best place to find ourselves”), from the Atlantic Ocean to an Alaskan glacier; on spirits in the tribal pantheons, including the Mexican guardian of the title; and on the importance of the bones of the dead. One of the most intriguing thoughts is touched on in the last chapter, a discussion of the phenomenon of phantom pain spun into thoughts on phantom lands and phantom memory. Interspersed also are moving sketches of animal encounters, highlighted by the stillbirth of a wild mustang foal. Nature—and the sad loss of the relationship between humans and the land as well as its destruction—is an undercurrent throughout. Hogan calls on both western legend and Native American myth to make many of her points.
A hopscotch of scenes, unsatisfying in part because so many powerful story ideas go undeveloped.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-05018-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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