Norman remains a national treasure, and his fans must be grateful to his son for convincing the old man to sit down and...
Reflections, rants and racy ruminations by the octogenarian author of The Naked and the Dead and other gems of American literature, interspersed with occasional questions and comments from his 27-year-old son, who is wise enough to know which of Mailer’s thoughts are of greater interest.
Many of the pieces in this eclectic collection are edited transcriptions of conversations between the Mailers; a few are previously published essays and speeches. NM and JBM have a lot on their minds: the current Bush White House; how many hard punches boxer Jose Torres took in his career; 9/11; Iraq; fascism; the number of gods there are in the universe. Their exchanges are generally genial, though Mailer père sometimes reminds Mailer fils that he is young and just doesn’t get it. The only conversation that contains any real friction is about marijuana, a subject upon which both men claim authority. The conversations are chockablock with NM’s wit, certitude and, at times, gender cluelessness. He observes that the Bush administration holds great faith in the stupidity of the American people, that the feckless Democrats deserved to lose in 2004, that sex with many women is instructive. He fires again across the bow of New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani, whom he once called “a one-woman kamikaze.” Here, he modifies the kamikaze part: “They, at least, were brave, whereas she may not have the outdoor guts of a pissant.” He makes some striking comments about writing, crediting Hemingway for teaching him about the “tensile strength of a sentence,” and some provocative ones about existentialism and Sartre. Both father and son worry that the days of the serious American novel are over, leaving us with only “the Big Empty.”
Norman remains a national treasure, and his fans must be grateful to his son for convincing the old man to sit down and answer a few questions. His answers are illuminating, annoying, amusing.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-824-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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