An often fascinating—if sometimes aggravating—history that explores how the Soviet Union tried to shape Western cultural opinion in the 1920's and 1930's. Koch (Writing/Columbia; The Bachelors' Bride, 1986, etc.) uses the story of the relatively obscure Communist propaganda master Willi MÅnzenberg as ``an Ariadne's thread through much in twentieth-century politics.'' MÅnzenberg—a German publisher and politician who operated largely in France (where he died mysteriously in 1940)—headed a huge media consortium of newspapers, magazines, and film companies, covertly financed by the USSR, that guided Western fellow travelers and propaganda fronts. Luminaries targeted as agents of influence—many of whom enlisted in the service of anti-Fascism—included those who broke quickly with this apparatus (John Dos Passos, AndrÇ Gide); the more easily hoodwinked (Ernest Hemingway, Romaine Rolland, AndrÇ Malraux); and diehard believers (Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Lincoln Steffens, Bertolt Brecht). MÅnzenberg's phrase for his network- -``Innocents' Clubs''—only begins to hint at the cynicism of the Soviet regime that exploited it. According to Koch, Stalin used the anti-Fascist movement as a cover while he and Hitler made arrangements through their secret services to crush domestic enemies. But the trouble with this grand conspiracy theory is that much of it rests on speculation—particularly when Koch discusses how MÅnzenberg's right-hand man, Otto Katz, spun a web of espionage that ensnared Bloomsbury's John Strachey, the notorious Cambridge spy ring, and, in America, Whittaker Chambers and his friends Alger Hiss and Noel Field. Here, Koch resorts to words like ``must have,'' ``probably,'' and ``almost certainly,'' indicating that his hunches will be borne out by the opening of Eastern European and Soviet archives. Koch rightly claims that those who led ``double lives'' are crucial to ``the moral life of this century''—but his work rests on too much guesswork, as well as on invective against mostly idealistic, if deluded, 30's liberals.
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-918730-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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