Spanning four decades, ranging from groundbreaking excavations to magisterial syntheses, this stimulating volume reminds us...
Uneven but rewarding collection of essays by poet and pioneering feminist scholar Gilbert (Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve, 2006, etc.).
“To reread is both to read again and to read anew,” writes the author in a preface to a volume that does indeed contain some rethinking, including more nuanced assessments of female writers’ ambivalence toward powerful women than were possible in the giddy early days of the Second Wave. The first section displays both the strengths and weaknesses of academic feminism. The charming “Becoming a Feminist Together—and Apart” chronicles Gilbert’s personal trials as a female graduate student turned down for jobs because she was “just a Berkeley housewife.” Readers will share her exhilaration as she discovers her métier and her convictions, team-teaching with Susan Gubar a course on female-authored texts that became The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), one of the founding works of modern feminism. By contrast, “What Do Feminist Critics Want?, Or a Postcard from the Volcano” is a tedious tract on scholarly politics of little interest to anyone outside the academy. The subsequent two sections, which feature close readings of authors from Emily Dickinson and Charlotte Brontë to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, are more engaging, though still best appreciated by those with a strong background in English-language literature. “Potent Griselda” reminds us that male writers, especially from the late 19th century on, have often acknowledged and sometimes even admired the power of the ancient Great Mother goddess, while “Mother Rites” is an ambitious attempt to analyze the strategies employed by female artists to tap the matriarch’s mythic powers without having their creativity simplistically tied to motherhood and biology. Gilbert occasionally lapses into academic jargon, but in her best pieces she is forthright without abdicating her mission as a scholar: to read beneath the surface of familiar works and show us what they say about our culture and our attitudes.
Spanning four decades, ranging from groundbreaking excavations to magisterial syntheses, this stimulating volume reminds us how much feminism has changed and grown since the 1970s.Pub Date: May 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-06764-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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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