A powerful, bracing call for a return to New Deal ethics in the age of Trump and Brexit.
A potent argument for “ethical capitalism,” driven not only by greed, but by “moral purpose,” to overcome deep societal rifts.
In this masterful blend of personal experience and the best thinking of diverse social scientists, economist Collier (Economics and Public Policy/Oxford Univ.; Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World, 2013, etc.) analyzes the current breakup of the “cornerstones of belonging”—family, workplace, and nation—and the ensuing frustrations that have opened the way for populists and ideologues. He urges pragmatic policies to manage capitalism (which is “not working” for many), rebuild the “beleaguered center” of the political spectrum and restore the “ethics of community” to contemporary life. He centers on three major societywide divides: between metropolitan centers and the provinces; between successful and poor families; and between prosperous nations (the United States, Britain, and France), where he has lived, and the developing world, where he has worked. “There is a widening regional divide between the booming metropolis and decaying provincial cities; there is a widening class divide between those in prestigious and fulfilling jobs and those in dead-end jobs, or none at all,” he writes. Only “practical new thinking” can heal such “damaging cleavages.” Collier’s benchmark for the “ethical state” is the postwar period (1945-1970) of his childhood, when each nation became a “gigantic community” based on “a strong sense of shared identity, obligation, and reciprocity” and harnessed capitalism for the benefit of all. The author is especially good on the forces unraveling shared identities, from the rise of smartphones and social media to declining home ownership among the young and my-country-first nationalism as opposed to patriotism. Many of Collier’s recommendations stress the need to strengthen failing families by “curtailing self-aggrandizing strategies of those who are well educated and highly skilled.” Great firms need a sense of purpose beyond making money, he writes.
A powerful, bracing call for a return to New Deal ethics in the age of Trump and Brexit.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-274865-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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