This fourth book by Dyson (Between God and Gangsta Rap, 1995, etc.) is a collection of interlocking essays pondering the ongoing dilemmas of race, class, and gender in the African-American community. ``Why another book on race?'' Dyson asks at the outset. He answers, ``Because we haven't learned our lessons.'' The seven chapters of his latest offering trace a complex line through the race/gender/class nexus, from the O.J. Simpson trial through the Million Man March, with thoughtful considerations of the nature of black male leadership, the need for a black Christian theology of sexuality, the role of black public intellectuals, and the intergenerational split within black America. At the heart of the book is the useful distinction that Dyson charts between race as context, as subtext, and as pretext. In practical terms, most effectively in his essay on male leadership, this trilogy is expressed as the difference between Colin Powell as one whose appeal is based on transcending race, Louis Farrakhan as one who has translated race, and Jesse Jackson as a leader who has transformed race. This last model is the one that Dyson forcefully valorizes, a leadership style that acknowledges the powerful wrongs of white supremacy but seeks to make common cause with others oppressed by sexism, homophobia, class and economic divisions. Dyson is himself a Baptist minister, and he shares the traditionalist framework that unites all three of his exemplars of black male leadership, but as his powerful chapter on sexuality and the black church indicates, he is not locked into a reactionary vision of gender and sexuality. On the downside, Dyson occasionally engages in too much on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand analysis; what is clearly an honest search for the truth occasionally reads like the temporizing of a politician seeking to appease all the voters. Despite its occasional shortcomings, a thoughtful and balanced addition to a national debate all too often marked by outraged polemic. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1996
ISBN: 0-201-91186-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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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