America the Beautiful is a lie, and the American dream is a nightmare for all but the rich. So argues leftist journalist Parenti (Land of Idols, 1993, etc.) in this scattershot collection. As the long subtitle suggests, this book gathers occasional pieces—sometimes only a couple of pages long—on subjects connected only by the author's insistent Marxist analysis, ``the other great paradigm that haunts the bourgeois scholarly world like a specter.'' One out of every six Americans regularly uses emotion-controlling medical drugs; 150,000 young people are reported missing every year; 16 million Americans have diabetes, thanks in part to a diet of sugary junk food; and 12 million Americans are chronically malnourished due to poverty. This is so, Parenti maintains, because ``the goal of ruling interests is to keep this society and the entire world open for maximum profitability regardless of the human and environmental costs.'' None of this is new, of course; any number of similarly inclined social critics have been pressing the argument for years. Parenti has a penchant for flogging long-dead horses: ``The Nazi invasion of Poland is fascism in action; the American invasion of Vietnam is a `blunder' or at worst an `immoral application' of power.'' He also has a maddening habit of refusing to get down to cases; he may well be right, but he never sticks around long enough to argue his point, instead firing a volley and dashing to the next target: the JFK assassination, global warming. When he does settle in for an extended discussion, he often scores points, as when he examines the role of the corporate media in stifling left journalistic criticism. And Parenti's memoir of growing up in a working-class Italian family is warm and fully realized while keeping a radical edge, a real contribution to the ethnic-studies literature. Still, Parenti is mostly content to offer propaganda in the place of closely argued advocacy.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-87286-318-2
Page Count: 282
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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
SEEN & HEARD
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