Though the author might romanticize the poor a bit, the profiles are uniformly affecting. Powerful reporting. (Appendixes...
Twenty years after Starving in the Shadow of Plenty, Schwartz-Nobel (The Baby Swap Conspiracy, 1993) revisits the topic of hunger in America.
One in ten Americans must rely on a neighborhood food bank or soup kitchen in order to eat each day. When the author first researched hunger in 1981, 30 million Americans were living below the poverty line; that figure is now 36 million. Here, Schwartz-Nobel talks to food-bank recipients as well as policymakers. Among the interviewed are families that have been poor for generations; enlisted personnel in the US military; the newly divorced within the middle class; refugees; and illegal immigrants. While readers may be aware of the hardships facing the extremely poor, they may be less familiar with the “hidden” epidemic of hunger among US military families and the working middle class. When the author visits a Marine base in Virginia, she finds a level of poverty unknown to her. With salaries so low that they qualify for food stamps and other aid, many of the Marine families still lack enough food to make it through the month. Their situation is made even more difficult when the husband is sent on field maneuvers: There is no food allowance for wives or children, so when he’s away, the allowance is deducted from his pay, leaving the families with even less. Meanwhile, the housing situation around some bases is so dire (San Diego, for example) that families are forced to live at local campgrounds—waiting for up to five months for base housing. From the middle class, the author profiles Ruth, whose husband cleaned out their bank account and left her responsible for payments on a $350,000 loan for his private practice. Unable to sell her home or car (both were in her husband’s name), Ruth resorted to stealing scrip from her synagogue.
Though the author might romanticize the poor a bit, the profiles are uniformly affecting. Powerful reporting. (Appendixes and notes)Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019563-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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