Joining a mighty stream of political titles appearing between now and Election Day, these 43 typically trenchant essays from the high-buzz Washington journal delight in tweaking conservative noses—and liberal ones, too. The 17 issues covered here range from A (abortion) to near-Z (welfare reform). Foreign-policy mavens will find only one issue (free trade) for them; even military spending is omitted. Also missing are discussions of gay issues—especially surprising given the frequent coverage of this subject under departing editor Andrew Sullivan. Yet there is still enough here to raise hackles, spark laughs, and provoke thought. As Lind (The Next American Nation, 1995) points out in the introduction, the magazine's readers ``enjoy the parade of iconoclastic viewpoints and the occasional fractious debate among senior editors'' (of whom Lind is one). For instance, the health care section begins with Mickey Kaus's ``HMOphobia,'' includes Elizabeth McCaughey's ``No Exit,'' which rallied right-wing intellectual opposition to the Clinton health plan (and propelled its author into a successful candidacy for the lieutenant governorship of New York), and concludes with Kaus's tart ``No Exegesis,'' which charges that McCaughey ``completely distorted the debate on the biggest public policy issue of 1994.'' Sometimes the focus is on anguished responses to issues (e.g., Naomi Wolf on feminists' abortion rhetoric and Glenn Loury on urban black crime). More often, however, the tone is irreverent as the authors dissect subjects inadequately covered in the general media because of their complexity, such as Michael Kinsley's evisceration of capital gains taxes, John Judis's ``The Contract with K Street,'' which puts the lobbying industry under the microscope, and Steve Tidrick's ``The Budget Inferno,'' which uses Dante's version of Hell as a metaphor for the way in which the federal government subsidizes corporations, industries, and individuals. Amid the usual gaffe-and-gotcha campaign journalism (which TNR itself has sometimes been guilty of), a bracing reminder of the enduring issues.
Pub Date: Aug. 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-465-05086-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
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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