A book that grabs us by the shoulders, turns us toward an important issue, and grips us until we truly see and understand.
A veteran advocate for mixing rather than segregating the generations returns with a volume whose title is hyperbolic but whose subtitle tells the story.
Social entrepreneur Freedman (The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife, 2011, etc.) writes that he’s “never much trusted self-help books or advice,” but he’s written one of the former and dispenses plenty of the latter. Regardless, the author’s principal point is important: The warehousing of our elderly, the establishment of elder-only communities all over the Southwest and elsewhere—these are turning out to be grievous wounds that we are inflicting upon ourselves. Their existence and proliferation deny the young easy access to the experience and wisdom of their elders, and they also deny (or make difficult) opportunities for older Americans to employ the skills—social, intellectual, emotional—that so many of them possess, skills that could have great social benefit. One of the strengths of the book is Freedman’s use of specifics: He tells stories about people who are doing what he advocates, communities that are working to mix the old and the young, and programs that he thinks are hopeful, including his own Generation to Generation, part of his organization encore.org. He also celebrates some individuals who have had an enduring effect on his own thinking and life, most notably the late John W. Gardner, the author of such classics as Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961), a man whom Freedman revered and who, the author tells us, once said that Freedman was like the son he never had. The author’s tone is enthusiastic and hopeful throughout, but the diction is occasionally clichéd (“the road hasn’t been entirely smooth”). Nonetheless, his enthusiasm is infectious and affecting, and his agenda bristles with sincerity and significance.
A book that grabs us by the shoulders, turns us toward an important issue, and grips us until we truly see and understand.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5417-6781-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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