A cautious, halting memoir of love between a prominent American and a high-ranking Soviet at the end of the Cold War, and the dramatic political context of their relationship. Eisenhower, chairman of the Center for Post-Soviet Studies and granddaughter of our 34th president, recounts the early years of her relationship with Roald Sagdeev, former head of the Soviet space program. The two met in 1987, when Eisenhower attended a conference in the USSR, and they married in 1990; their courtship coincided with widespread upheaval in the Soviet Union, as well as a period of unprecedented transformation in US/Soviet relations. This is no match of ideological opposites; despite Sagdeev's Party membership, he is closely associated with prominent dissident Andrei Sakharov and highly critical of Mikhail Gorbachev for moving too slowly with perestroika. Eisenhower effectively interweaves their romance with a narrative of Soviet and American political events from 1987 to 1991, which directly affected the couple's relationship, determining what they could say to each other on the phone and even in person (they were being spied on by both sides) and whether they could get visas or support from government officials. The book is encumbered by Eisenhower's often stilted, distant writing (for instance, she characterizes an experience that must have been wrenching as merely ``regrettable''), as well as her reluctance to divulge intimate details; at one point, for example, she simply calls a farewell to Sagdeev ``one of the most difficult partings I can remember,'' making no attempt to describe it. She also has a tendency to flatter family members (Dad says ``Wow'' when she reveals her marriage plans; her kids from her previous marriage are models of politeness when Sagdeev moves in)—not the sort of practice that inspires confidence in an autobiographer's honesty. A compelling story, but not self-disclosing enough to have the emotional weight it calls for.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-26246-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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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