A sprawling, passionate account of the Vietnam and postwar journeys of Annapolis graduates John Poindexter, Robert McFarlane, Oliver North, John McCain, and James Webb. Timberg, deputy Washington bureau chief for the Baltimore Sun and himself a Naval Academy graduate and Vietnam veteran, uses these five men to tell the story of a generation's ``anguish and sense of betrayal.'' He draws disparate portraits of the five protagonists, who graduated from Annapolis over a ten-year period, from 1958 to 1968. Cerebral scientist Poindexter graduated at the top of his class and earned a doctorate in nuclear physics from Caltech. Fun-loving hell-raiser McCain suffered more than five years as a POW in Vietnam and on his release built a successful political career. McFarlane, intellectually and spiritually inclined, nearly decided to become a minister rather than a Marine. North, a highly competent and dedicated Marine officer, also had an aggressive gift for self-promotion. Webb became a lawyer and successful novelist after his combat experiences. As young plebes, all heard what the author calls ``the nightingale's song,'' which told them that serving America in the military was and ought to be a source of pride. For each man, that song was silenced for years by the knowledge that civilians viewed the Vietnam war as a misadventure and held the men who fought it in low esteem. Timberg contends that Ronald Reagan's assertion that Vietnam was a noble cause reactivated the nightingale's song in a different way for each man, leading Poindexter, McFarlane, and North to the excesses of the Iran-Contra scandal; resulting in high-level government appointments for Webb, including a brief tenure as secretary of the Navy; and providing the foundation for McCain's tenure in the Senate. Timberg uses the stories of five men and the transformation of the Naval Academy to chronicle America's loss of innocent faith in itself and the consequences of that loss for a generation.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80301-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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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