A hit-or-miss ramble in praise of giving time to wasting time.
A glancing meditation on the value of spending idle time with friends, family, and strangers.
“Hanging out is about daring to do nothing much and, even more than that, about daring to do it in the company of others,” writes Liming, a professor of literature, media, and writing. The “daring” bit seems a little overstated. Most people, apart from those in isolation and agoraphobes, seem not to have trouble finding ways to lounge around with a clutch of fellow lollygaggers watching a ball game or arguing over the ways of the world. Liming means something more rarefied, with hanging out—not doing much—as an act of resistance against a late-stage capitalist regime that demands that we all be available to work all the time. Hanging out, she writes, “marks the boundaries of a sanctuary space that exists at a remove from the pressures of market-driven competition.” That’s all well and good, and capable of being said without much buttressing. Still, the author consistently calls in the cavalry, from Emerson to Theodor Adorno to Walter Benjamin. Where the appeal to authority is apposite, it’s often qualified: “[M.F.K.] Fisher is, so far as I am concerned, one of the preeminent twentieth-century voices not just on the subject of eating but on eating socially.” The hedging clause is no more necessary than Liming’s rendering of a hiking trip as “the work of collective arrival,” a formulation both arid and abstract. The author deserves praise for honesty, however, in admitting that the conferences so beloved of academics are really “fundamentally about seizing the opportunity to hang out.” Liming is at her best when she considers in-person lounging against the online hanging out that younger people seem increasingly to prefer and which will change the face of socializing: After all, you can’t catch pandemic diseases over the internet, and gathering in groups is a prerequisite condition for mass shootings.
A hit-or-miss ramble in praise of giving time to wasting time.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-68589-005-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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