A revealing, on-the-ground report that ably shows that the real looters after disaster are not the poor.
Activist and journalist Klein (No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, 2017, etc.) looks at the “shock doctrine” as it is now unfolding in the ruins of Puerto Rico.
There’s a method to the apparent madness that, more than half a year after the devastation of hurricanes Irma and Maria, keeps much of Puerto Rico without electricity and drinking water. By the author’s account in this brief cri de coeur, it affords an opportunity for a clearance sale and land boom, which explains why the “disaster capitalists who have descended on Puerto Rico are reinforcing the most traumatizing part of the disaster they are there to exploit: the sense of helplessness.” Helplessness is the keyword for cities and their chokepoints, dependent on sea traffic from Florida to bring in supplies, unable to rely on agribusiness for fresh produce, and unable to air condition or light buildings. What to do? Sell out cheap and move to America, turning Puerto Rico into a place for natives to visit even as the speculators are moving to turn San Juan into the next Miami, helped along by a governor who seems committed to the project of luring American corporations to the island with a 4 percent corporate tax rate, “a fraction of what corporations pay even after Donald Trump’s recent tax cut.” It all seems to be working, except that, as Klein notes, plenty of Puerto Ricans are demonstrating that there can be another course, one in which the island is remade with small farms and gardens, renewable power, decentralized government, and other instruments of economic, small-is-beautiful revolution. As the author tours the island, she contrasts the desolation of the cities with the relative prosperity of communities that have adopted these soft-path, anti-colonialist strategies. Which will prevail? “Both are gaining power fast,” writes Klein in conclusion, “and in the high-stakes months and years to come, collision is inevitable.”
A revealing, on-the-ground report that ably shows that the real looters after disaster are not the poor.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60846-357-2
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2018
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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