A rich, complex book that makes splendid use of data to trace the recent renaissance of city neighborhoods and how children...
A sociologist’s account of the “stunning” decline in urban American violence in the past two decades.
In a nuanced work based on three years of research on the ways in which dwindling crime has “altered” city life—mainly for the better—Sharkey (Chair, Sociology/New York Univ.; Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality, 2013) provides significant new data showing how, since the 1990s, cities have come back to life. Families returned from the suburbs. Poor neighborhoods attracted newcomers. Schools became safer. Fewer homicides sparked “an improvement in the life expectancy of black men that rivals any public health breakthrough of the last several decades.” Indeed, “2014 was the safest on record in New York, and one of the safest in U.S. history,” he writes. Quick to note that most Americans don’t believe these trends (largely due to crime-heavy local news reporting and outright misleading news), Sharkey shows how an era of intensive policing, punitive criminal justice policies, aggressive prosecution of offenders, unprecedented incarceration, and uncommon mobilization of community residents has produced these remarkable changes. He examines how neighborhood organizations have emerged as “guardians” of urban spaces, the roles of private security and surveillance, and the many benefits of safer streets, especially for the disadvantaged. There are excellent sections on how children are affected by inequality and violence, the changing nature of life in gentrified Harlem and Washington, D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood, and the role of videos in unleashing “intense, visceral anger” in poor communities over clashes with police. With signs that violent crime has risen in the last few years, the author argues that sustained investment in stronger neighborhoods (preparing them for the coming return of incarcerated residents), with more community-minded police and other advocates, must occur under concerted action by the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.
A rich, complex book that makes splendid use of data to trace the recent renaissance of city neighborhoods and how children and the poor flourish in a time of relative peace.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-60960-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
IN THE NEWS
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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