A tiresome and tendentious book that destroys its own credibility through hyperbole and careless composition.
Confidently predicting nuclear annihilation and the worldwide destruction of civilization as we know it, Tor/Forge executive editor Gleason (End of Days, 2011, etc.) accuses American political leaders from both parties of treason.
“Future scholars may well argue,” writes the author, “that the most significant datum in U.S. history was that—for the sake of personal avarice—our politicians…traded with America’s nuclear enemies and helped bankroll the nation’s financial ruin and its nuclear destruction.” The author has become something of a professional enthusiast of the apocalypse, with a show on the History Channel, a novel featuring the destruction of the world, and now a hastily written and poorly edited broadside against the political establishment. While Gleason does bring to light how the United States has promoted the spread of nuclear power in dozens of countries, his unfocused approach makes it difficult to take seriously. The author conflates low-enriched uranium and highly enriched uranium throughout, though the two substances are radically different, a basic confusion which belies his self-proclaimed expert knowledge of proliferation. He refers to nuclear power plants as “nuclear bomb-fuel refineries,” and his estimate of the annual production of nuclear waste is dubious at best. Information boxes and bullet points on nearly every page are often only tangentially related to the subject at hand: Gleason rehashes the Bush dynasty’s well-known connections to companies that benefitted from the Nazi regime and describes the economic crisis as “A Detonating Debt-Bubble of Apocalyptic Proportions.” Gleason’s analysis of nuclear strategy and game theory has the feel of a quickly written undergraduate term paper. He muses, “Why India would want the ability to nuke the United States is a very strange conundrum,” and asserts that “Pakistan is so fearful of India, one could imagine that country nuking China, then trying to blame India.”
A tiresome and tendentious book that destroys its own credibility through hyperbole and careless composition.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3812-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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
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