Solnit (Savage Dreams, not reviewed, etc.) impressively plaits together the landscape, identity politics, and literature of Ireland in this exquisite piece of travel writing. When her uncle's research led to Californian Solnit receiving an Irish passport—the purple document with its embossed harp speaking to her of exile, colonization, emigration, heritage—she hoofed it over to the Emerald Isle. There she just followed her whims, and the result is this, ``a book of essays sequenced and shaped by my journey.'' Solnit is a shrewd and canny observer of everyday life, a student who likes to know the background, an adept at the fine art of seeing, then excavating and deciphering what she sees with a crackingly smart leftist take. She places the reader in unfamiliar positions from which to view, say, Irish literature (``a sensibility more cognizant of the arbitrariness of literary form and all the opportunities of subverting it''), or tourism (``It is the perfect industry for the information age: one of leisure, consumption, displacement, simulation''). Swift and Eliot and Heaney make appearances, as does the island's last patch of true forest; Solnit gabs with a hermitess, with nomads, with pub-goers; she gets on her feet and walks to places whose names are like incantations: Dawnuknockane, Ballydehob, the coast of Clare, the Cliffs of Moher. Everywhere there is movement—from her own love of travel, of slipping out of ``a settled destiny in pursuit of stranger fates,'' to the waves of invasion and emigration that have pressed themselves into the national mythology. Her writing can be nimble, as when she gives her political slant on an event or conjures the particular taste of a place; it can have the abstracted quality of being lost deep in thought; and rarely, it can be labored when she overconsiders some character's makeup, some landscape's disposition. Truly exceptional, a paradise for readers of travel literature.
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-85984-855-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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