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
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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