Social history that, like certain academics’ clothes, presents an overall handsome, even flashy appearance while looking...
In what he bills “a book unashamedly about appearances,” the acerbic literary and social critic (The Anti-Egotist, 1994, etc.) analyzes, with varying degrees of success, what uniforms reveal about class, sex, and the need to belong.
Instead of resentment over the stultifying conformity of uniforms, Fussell finds intense pride—the esprit de corps that realizes uniforms’ attempts to suggest probity, professionalism, courage, and cleanliness, for such people as chefs, nurses, Boy Scouts, police officers, and airline pilots. Sexiness can even be a welcome result for the uniformed ranks, as evidenced by the heart-fluttering generated by many UPS workers. Often Fussell turns up fascinating factoids (Queen Victoria popularized boys’ sailor suits and white dressing gowns), and he can rise to heights of comic exaggeration (Roman Catholic priests’ soutanes contain “the most flagrant exhibition of buttons anywhere in the uniform world”). Unfortunately, much of his material outside the English-speaking world is threadbare, and his invective is occasionally adolescent (he dismisses battle re-enactors as “weirdos”). But when he writes about subjects he’s examined in other books—Boy Scouts, literature, class, and especially the military—he is best at blending incisive commentary with background history. In WWII, the attitudes of the American GI and the SS officer—casual anti-authoritarianism vs. grim intimidation—could be seen immediately by their uniforms, he notes. He reserves his lethal ironic fire for those who tamper with sartorial success, including Admiral Elmo Zumwalt’s attempt to alter the Navy’s suits and Richard Nixon’s order to dress the White House police in outfits suggesting a European comic operetta. Above all, he says, uniforms suggest a profound human contradiction: “Each person senses the psychological imperative to dress uniformly and recognizably like others, while responding at the same time . . . to the impulse to secretly treasure and exhibit occasionally a singular identity or ‘personality.’ ”
Social history that, like certain academics’ clothes, presents an overall handsome, even flashy appearance while looking oddly patched together.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-06746-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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
© 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.
