Lindqvist (``Exterminate All the Brutes'': One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, 1996, etc.) honors courageous visionaries from the 18th to the mid- 20th centuries who stood up to the prevailing racism of their time- -a well-intentioned notion only partially carried off. The author achieves his modest primary goal, ``to remind readers of some anti-racists, who today are often forgotten.'' In fact, some of those featured are well known, for instance, Benjamin Franklin, who rode out to intercept the ``Paxton boys'' as they headed to Philadelphia to murder Indians. His speech to the mob persuaded them to turn back. Other idealists are rescued from obscurity, among them Friedrich Tiedemann, a gynecological surgeon during the Napoleonic Wars, who is the subject of the title essay. He conducted a skull-measuring experiment that dared to conclude that Europeans did not have the largest brains. Though his work ``delay[ed] the advance of racism'' for a time, eventually the conclusions of smaller-minded scientists (such as the American Samuel Morton) prevailed. The lives of these outspoken figures were often lonely. Olive Schreiner, a South African activist and author, was ``detested by men because she was a feminist, and by South African feminists because she insisted on the vote for black women as well.'' Through lively, brief vignettes, Lindqvist shows that racist doctrine had its opponents, even in generally unenlightened times. But the author's tone, perhaps muddled further by a weak translation, undermines the book. Some writings of activists are quoted. But many are paraphrased at length, and the author's voice becomes confused with his subjects'. This is a useful, unpretentious volume that may give context and hope to the fight against racism, while admittedly charting no new territory.
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-56584-363-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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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