Essays of mixed quality on mixed issues by a writer of mixed ethnicity. A resident of the Choctaw-Cherokee-Welsh-Irish-Cajun mixed space lying in between —unhyphenated cultures,— University of Oklahoma English professor and novelist Owens (The Sharpest Sight, 1992) writes acutely of a generally accepted fact of American life: that most of us come from mixed backgrounds, our pedigrees a tangle of bloodlines and nationalities. In his instance, this tangle becomes problematic: billed as a Native American writer but shunned by certain Native critics (such as the Lakota scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, who comes in for quite a shellacking in his pages) for not being pure enough of blood, Owens is no garden-variety WASP, either. His examinations of works by Native writers such as N. Scott Momaday and Gerald Vizenor explore their negotiations between ancestral cultures and the dominant Anglo culture of the university and the publishing world; these essays are unfailingly interesting (if sometimes too heavily burdened by current critical jargon). So, too, are Owens’s dissections of the portrayal of Native Americans in hallmark films like Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (—from beginning to end, the perfect, exquisite reenactment of the whole colonial enterprise in America . . . beautifully disguised as its opposite—) and John Ford’s The Searchers (John Wayne’s —most profound role in what [the film medium] has to say about America’s eroticized hatred of the indigenous peoples of America—). Less interesting, however, and less successful, are his autobiographical excursions, which seem marked by a curious distance, as if Owens cannot quite find himself as a character in his own story; instead, he reiterates again and again his mixed-blood status, which forces him —to check a single box on every form,— without ever saying how this status affected his development as a writer and scholar. A valuable addition to Native American studies, nonetheless.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8061-3051-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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