Interesting profiles, ho-hum analysis.
A by-now familiar study of accomplished, powerful women and their inability to combine high-octane careers with motherhood in the existing corporate culture.
Hewlett (coauthor, The War Against Parents, 1998) began interviewing prominent achievers in diverse fields for a book about women turning 50 in the millennium. Then she found that none of her subjects had children and, delving further, that none of them had deliberately chosen to be childless. Focusing on high-achieving professionals ages 40-55, the author tries to determine how these female lawyers, bankers, and physicians differ from their male counterparts, most of whom are able to balance work and family. Unfortunately, Hewlett breaks no news with her discoveries. She concludes that moving up the career ladder requires long hours, including important “face time” extending late into the evening. Many “ultra-high achievers” also have to travel several times each month, and their few remaining evening hours are spent answering business e-mail and voicemail. In this sort of work culture, high-achieving women are hard-pressed to find a mate, especially since they often want to marry highly successful men who may find a “less threatening” woman more appealing. By the time a woman has successfully negotiated a career, found a suitable spouse, and decided to have children, she may be too old to conceive without medical intervention. Corporate America is the villain here, feels Hewlett, whose less-then-groundbreaking solutions include a time bank of six months of paid leave that can be taken throughout a child’s life, the creation of high-level jobs that allow for reduced hours, and the promotion of new legislation to eliminate long-hour work weeks. Astonishingly, the author feels that this book will “help young women find both love and work” by encouraging them to become highly proactive in finding a partner and having children early.
Interesting profiles, ho-hum analysis.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6766-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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