Satisfying food for thought on the ever changing dynamics of men and women as they interact and go about their individual...
Examination of the new roles women and men are playing in the home and the workplace.
When Esquire columnist Marche's wife was offered a job in Toronto, it meant the author (The Hunger of the Wolf, 2016, etc.) would be leaving New York City, good friends, and a teaching job so she could take this important position. It was not an easy decision, but the family decided to move. Marche continued his writing career, albeit a different one than before, while taking on the role of househusband and caretaker for their young son. The author intertwines various personal threads—the births of his children, the death of his father, the importance of his grandfather's watch, the complexity of being a father and husband—with larger issues that confound men as they watch women advance in the workplace and recede, to a certain extent, from the home. Marche addresses sexuality, sexual orientation, and the advances gays and transgender people have made in society; the prolific increase of pornography on the internet and how this is linked to a rise in violence against women; how to let children be themselves while inserting a certain amount of control and conformity; and the slog of necessary chores that falls under the heading of housework. The status of men at work and at home is definitely in flux, and Marche effectively pinpoints the most prominent areas, most of which are familiar to women, who have been struggling to assert themselves for decades. Throughout the book, the author includes footnote comments by his wife, which add a lighter air to the narrative and give it a better sense of balance. The definitions of masculinity and manliness are changing, and Marche's commentaries will help readers understand how.
Satisfying food for thought on the ever changing dynamics of men and women as they interact and go about their individual lives.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8015-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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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