Great for fans, hit-and-miss for new readers.
Provocative, sometimes repetitive reports on sex, politics, gay life and the media.
Radio host, columnist and gay activist Signorile (Life Outside, 1997, etc.) is best-known for his controversial 1980s and ’90s “outing” campaign—revealing the secret gay lives of public figures. However, in the preface to this collection of his columns published between 1996 and 2004, Signorile reaches beyond his gay audience and provocateur past to position himself as a player on the national political scene. At times, he makes good on his promise, to the book’s detriment—when Signorile’s lefty rants diverge from gay politics, they are indistinguishable from the usual fare. Readers looking for Signorile-type scandal won’t be disappointed, though. Subjects of confrontational screeds on hypocrisy include Tom Cruise, Rosie O’Donnell and, most effectively, Vice President Cheney’s lesbian daughter, Mary. Signorile also appears as gadfly of the GLBT community, urging its Republican members to abandon their party and its representatives to stand by their demands. Some of the author’s most successful columns run counter to Signorile’s much-hyped type: a sensitive piece of good reporting on gay teen activists and their parents, a non-judgmental exploration of the cultural differences impacting Italian gay activism, early coverage of the transgender movement that clarifies the challenges it poses to the larger queer community (including Signorile himself) and an interview-driven piece on why some gays and lesbians choose to live in rural communities. Unfortunately, the collection exposes Signorile’s tendency to repeat himself, sometimes almost verbatim, on the subjects of outing, the failures of the media and the possibility of a renewed AIDS crisis. The topics bear repeating—Signorile’s persistent fight against American apathy about AIDS is particularly commendable—but the reiterations don’t offer much beyond historical interest. Further, since Signorile offers only the occasional brief reflection on his work and many of the columns are readily available on his website, casual readers may question investing in the book itself.
Great for fans, hit-and-miss for new readers.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1619-3
Page Count: 275
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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