Readers in Texas—and even nationally—who want change should pay attention and get started on the author’s to-do lists. She...
How to change the political landscape in Texas, “the reddest of the red-hot states, covered by a big bubble that protects the most reactionary, radical, and rabid set of officeholders that much of the country has ever seen.”
As Ann Richards’ campaign manager in 1990 and 1994, Rogers (Cold Anger: A Story of Faith and Power Politics, 1990) watched as the Democrats ignored warning signs and the Republicans took over the state. The Democratic Party was locked in internecine warfare, spewing out grievances dating back to Reconstruction, and Republicans rejected the 1950s-era anti-communist hysteria and John Birch Society as bad for business and moved to the middle. The author explains the strange world of Texas: its complexity, diversity, special interests, and political history. Only with a sense of Texas’ sincere hatred of any and all government since the Civil War can one understand how to secure the vote. The author’s disappointments, morphing into real bitterness, show throughout the book; she calls Texas the “reddest wacko state in the union.” The takeover of the state by Republicans was complete by 1998, when they won every statewide elected office and just about obliterated the Democratic Party. Texas is her story, but the practices and politics used have spread to the rest of the country. The imprint of Texas Republicans can be seen in the leadership of the tea party, gerrymandering of congressional seats, mega donors, tort reform, and elsewhere. When she calms down, Rogers provides genuinely sharp insight into where the Democrats went wrong. She explains how they must copy the successful methods of the Republicans, microtargeting Hispanics, blacks, and cynical whites. She notes that the price of oil plays a large part in party power switching, especially the governor’s office, which she considers of primary importance.
Readers in Texas—and even nationally—who want change should pay attention and get started on the author’s to-do lists. She knows the territory, and she wants it back.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07908-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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