A rueful portrait of war made into politics by other means.
Fuel for a growing fire: a fly-on-the-wall, day-by-day account, by Labour Party stalwart Cook, of British prime minister Tony Blair’s acquiescence in George Bush’s war in Iraq.
Blair’s commitment of Great Britain to the Bush-Cheney “Neo-Con” cause brewed up a terrible crisis in the halls of Parliament, one that led former House of Commons leader Cook to resign from the government in March 2003, just as the Allied invasion got under way. Bad enough, Cook suggests, that the UK was cast in the role of junior partner while other European nations sensibly repudiated the war; Blair’s alliance with Bush, Cook writes, “is symptomatic of a wider problem from New Labour’s lack of ideological anchor. . . . [Blair] never comprehended the perplexity he would cause his supporters at home by becoming the trusty partner of the most reactionary US Administration in modern times.” Cook has no kind words for those agents of reaction; he twits Bush apologist Richard Perle, for example, for storming off a BBC set when confronted with less-than-unanimous support for American hegemony. Public opinion against the war was not so strong as to turn Labour out on its ear—at least in part, Cook suggests, because the Conservative opposition was all for the war, too, giving voters no alternative. Yet Blair’s alignment with Bush pushed away many who otherwise lined up with Labour on several critical issues, adding to a phenomenon Cook observes early in his pages: that “the country beyond Westminster is today much less tribal in its political loyalties. . . . Nowadays voters have a healthy tendency to change their minds between elections and very few buy into the complete programme of even their party of choice.” Blair’s “programme,” Cook suggests, was founded on no small amount of cynicism, as evidenced by its oh-well attitude toward the persistent failure of Allied intelligence to find weapons of mass destruction anywhere in defeated Iraq—an attitude that Cook repeatedly, and effectively, disparages.
A rueful portrait of war made into politics by other means.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-6423-1
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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