Eschewing both “revolution [and] resignation,” Romeo offers a powerful addition to an urgent debate.
Romeo spins a series of New Yorker articles into a cohesive argument that there are alternatives “to our disastrous economic status quo.”
The author opens by challenging the basic received truth in neoclassical economics that it is a science, operating under its own set of ineluctable laws and with no political or moral dimension. This alone is worth the price of admission, revealing the increasingly narrow perspective promulgated by academia and the flexibility of thought that comes with the introduction of other disciplines, including history, philosophy, and psychology. Romeo then goes on to survey eight different real-world models based in such heterodox thought: true pricing of consumer goods; the movement for an actual living wage; job guarantees; gig-work platforms that operate as public utilities; worker-owned cooperatives; perpetual purpose trusts that “dethrone shareholder primacy and profit maximization”; participatory budgeting at the municipal level; and the use of private equity to create employee stock ownership plans. Such an exploration may sound technocratic, but Romeo never loses his thread: that these approaches are based on both sound economic policy and a commitment to reject the immiseration of an underclass as an “economic necessity.” Variations on decent, moral, and ethical suffuse the text, continually challenging readers to look beyond cost-benefit analyses; that author argues that “no amount of added value for shareholders…can justify the existence of child labor.” Though the examples Romeo presents are satisfyingly mind-bending, they are largely limited to Europe and the U.S. While this effectively establishes proof of concept in developed economies, it ignores whatever innovation may be taking place in the global south and elsewhere that might further upend traditional economic thought. Nevertheless, it makes a terrific complement to Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America for readers looking for practical solutions.
Eschewing both “revolution [and] resignation,” Romeo offers a powerful addition to an urgent debate.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781541701595
Page Count: 384
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
