A nuanced look at how the recent election shaped—and was shaped by—gender.
Salon staff writer Traister makes the compelling argument that the 2008 election campaign changed the role of women in national politics.
Hillary Clinton was the first woman to win a presidential primary, and while her hard-hitting, tough campaigning made her the target of sexist vitriol, both she and President Obama received more primary votes than any other presidential candidate in history. The author writes that the 2008 election was wholly transformative. “Over a period of just a few years,” she writes, “the United States, its assumptions, its prejudices, its colors, shapes, sizes, and vocabulary, had cracked open.” In addition to Clinton, Traister sees the choice of Alaska’s first female governor for John McCain’s running mate as another strong indication of this transformation. Sarah Palin reflected this idea in her first press conference, saying, “It was rightly noted in Denver this week that Hillary left eighteen million cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling in America. But it turns out that the women of America aren’t finished yet, and we can shatter that class ceiling once and for all!” In 1984, at the age of nine, Traister’s mother let her pull the lever for the Walter Mondale ticket, which included Geraldine Ferraro as the vice-presidential candidate. Twenty-five years later she was torn between voting for Obama or Clinton. Although she ended up choosing Clinton, her indecision reflected a rift between older feminists such as Gloria Steinem, for whom electing a woman president was the only priority, and younger women like herself, who were tired of the “earnest piety” of traditional feminism and wanted “to get over ourselves a little bit, to dispense with the sacred cows, to question power and cultivate new ideas and leaders.” Traister’s dissatisfaction with Democratic centrism had made John Edwards her first choice, but her commitment to Clinton deepened by what she perceived to be a sexist media gang up against her.
A nuanced look at how the recent election shaped—and was shaped by—gender.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5028-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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