Despite the best of motives, Nader shoots down his own case for convergence.
Activist Nader (The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future, 2012, etc.) sketches out places of “convergence” where liberals and conservatives can start working together for the public good.
Though increasingly rare, the author points to a number of instances when lawmakers worked in concert to support automobile airbags, prison reform, halt media concentration, and oppose taxpayer-funded stadiums and arenas. Sometimes they found success; often, they got bogged down in committee or watered down during the process. However, as Nader argues, we also must acknowledge the global corporate giants, whose “DNA commands them to control, undermine or eliminate any force, tradition, or institution that impedes their expansion of sales, profits, and executive compensation.” Certainly, there is endless ammunition to support this point, and Nader trots out one infuriating illustration after another—e.g., “the Department of Defense cannot or will not make an annual audit of it sprawling $527 billion yearly budget, not counting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan”—but corporate and governmental malfeasance are givens. The issue is how to make government heed “the supremacy of civic values to which commercial pursuits must adjust.” Nader lists reforms with which many lawmakers would agree, including breaking up too-big-to-fail banks, protecting children from commercialism and ending corporate personhood. However, he also delivers many examples where lawmakers are despairing, stymied by partisanship or in the corporate pocket. “Whether Democrats or Republicans are in control, corporations still receive the same wasteful or expanding assorted privileges,” while corporate welfare is ever more varied and bipartisan. Nader hopes that “convergence stimulates the depth of our basic humanity and sense of justice,” but it feels awfully distant from this vantage point. If the best we can do is “agree on a general policy or stance without having to also agree on the exact implications or use that would be made of a policy,” that sounds like planting seeds with no hope of rain.
Despite the best of motives, Nader shoots down his own case for convergence.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-56858-454-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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