An incisive and instructive study of personality politics and the abuse of power—topical literary criticism with classical...
A leading scholar invokes the Bard of Avon to investigate why anyone would “be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving or indifferent to the truth.”
In this study of the power-hungry monarchs in the plays of Shakespeare, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Greenblatt (Humanities/Harvard Univ.; The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, 2017, etc.) frequently points out why the great English playwright set his work in the vanished past: It was the only way to write a political play. No one could say a word against Queen Elizabeth and expect to live, but you could do it covertly by wrestling with modern issues from a distant perspective. Though under no such restrictions himself, Greenblatt, who has previously assessed Shakespeare as an editor and a biographer, takes this model to heart, using the plays to deliver his own barbed critique of the current occupant of the White House, who makes the job easy; the author doesn’t even have to say his name. We glimpse him in the demagogue John Cade in 2 Henry VI, eager “to make England great again” by attacking the “educated elite.” In Richard III, we see the swaggerer with a deep inferiority complex, compensating for his defects by “bullying those who possess the natural endowments he lacks.” King Lear’s “boundless desire to hear his praises sung” easily brings to mind a president surrounded by a Cabinet of flatterers. In The Winter Tale’s King Leontes, we see the ruler destroyed by his own suspicions, constantly responding to the fake news in his head. “A tyrant does not need to traffic in facts or apply evidence,” writes the author. “He expects his accusation to be enough.” Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus come in for similar timely reappraisals.
An incisive and instructive study of personality politics and the abuse of power—topical literary criticism with classical virtues.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63575-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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