A rural canvas of extremes—from hard-bitten bigots to the naïve, the sure of faith, and the latitudinarians—disentangled by...
Talk about strangers in a strange land: Bloom’s story of the heartland Lubavitcher meatpackers and the waves they caused to ripple across the rural Iowan landscape is an immediate, elegantly personal piece of reportage.
In 1987, a Brooklyn, New York, butcher bought an abandoned slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, and turned it into a kosher meatpacking plant, owned and operated by the Hasidic Jews known as the Lubavitchers. The largest such operation in the US, it was (and is) hugely successful, bringing money into the Postville economy at a time when every other Midwestern downtown was being killed by Wal-Mart, and it helped to stabilize the skewed agricultural economy that was sending one family farm after another down the river. Bloom (Journalism/Univ. of Iowa) was a piece of flotsam himself, having recently washed up in Iowa after he and his wife had concluded that San Francisco was no longer a fit place in which to raise a family. Just then the Lubavitchers were having a hard time with the locals in Postville (who wanted to annex the land the slaughterhouse sat on, exert a little control over the business, and tap into its profits). Bloom was curious. Was it that the Jews had become a ruling class that the locals found grating? Was there hard-wired bigotry at work all around? Why did the Lubavitchers refuse to acknowledge even the presence of anyone who wasn’t Lubavitcher? Had they too moved to Iowa for the same reasons Bloom had? What did they make of this white, Christian kingdom, this place of soft summer nights, fireflies, and swings on the front porch? Bloom’s exploration of the antagonisms between the two groups is subtle and canny, not aspiring to great truths but revealing of all the little miscommunications, unintended slights, expectations, and prejudices that rally round when very distinct cultures meet.
A rural canvas of extremes—from hard-bitten bigots to the naïve, the sure of faith, and the latitudinarians—disentangled by the author with deft, probing strokes.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-15-100652-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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