“Ukraine deserves its place in the sun as a truly independent nation, but it must be realistic about the journey to that...
The Cold War gets hotter, thanks to Russian ambitions to rebuild the Soviet empire—but, veteran foreign correspondent Kalb (The Road to War: Presidential Commitments Honored and Betrayed, 2013, etc.) writes, thanks as well to Western ineptitude.
It all comes down to Ukraine, a country that is really two countries, one Western-facing, the other bound to Russia. It’s the eastern one that Russia has been gnawing into, claiming bits of territory here and there, most notably the Crimea after the last Winter Olympics. There has been much mishandling on all sides, not least when pro-Russian forces shot down a civilian airliner, killing hundreds of mostly Dutch travelers. However, argues the author, who was nearly finished with a doctorate in Russian before being whisked off into journalism by Edward R. Murrow, much that has occurred recently seems nearly inevitable. It will not please Moscow to read his criticisms of Putin, but neither will it please Kiev to learn that he considers much of its claim to autonomy from Russia to be misguided. Even though Russia has been the aggressor in the recent strife, he suggests that any accommodation will largely have to come from the Ukrainian side: “the first step out of the current crisis is an acceptable modus vivendi between Russia and Ukraine, an arrangement under which Russia, because it is by far the stronger of the two, gets the larger half of the loaf, Ukraine the smaller one.” Kalb also writes casually of inborn “Slavic indolence,” which is not likely to win him points on the eastern shore of the Danube and beyond. Finally, correct or not, the present administration is unlikely to warm to Kalb’s policy recommendations, since he paints President Barack Obama as someone alternately bewildered by and uninterested in Russian affairs, particularly the boss, Putin.
“Ukraine deserves its place in the sun as a truly independent nation, but it must be realistic about the journey to that goal.” Realism is a keyword in this think-tank treatise of much interest to policy wonks.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8157-2664-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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