Next book

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN TEENAGER

This attempt to create a new historical perspective on the American teenager barely scratches the surface. Cultural historian Hine’s (Populuxe, 1986, etc.) larger argument is fairly convincing: the American teenager was a social invention of the New Deal, designed to get the young out of the workplace in order to provide more jobs for adults with children to support. As both social and market conditions have changed in the last few decades, this social construct has become obsolete and actually a hindrance to society, but has continued to maintain an important structuring idea about the way we think of our young. The “fall” (dropping out, becoming pregnant, joining gangs, etc.) of the teenager can be attributed to a tension created between a loss of license for irresponsibility (youths tried as adults, etc.) and a continued denial of their place within society. His solution to this problem is both simplistic and impossible to set into action—he envisions an ideological shift by which we come to view teenagers as beginning members of society who need to continue to be protected but are allowed an active, albeit, provisional access to meaningful cultural interactions. His only practical suggestion toward this end is the continuance of charter schools, which he views as at least organizing schooling around a specific goal rather than the “wasting” of teenagers” time. The weakness of the book is primarily methodological; Hine seems to confuse his social constructivist notion of the teenager as a historically contingent creation with a universalistic ahistorical notion of the teenager as a young person who is actively attempting to find his or her place in the world. This confusion causes the purely historical chapters, such as “Dancing Daughters,” which focuses on changing female sexuality, to seem disconnected from the larger focus of the work; it reads as a rather random exposition of the shift from kissing to dancing to heavy petting. A rather weak treatment of an important and timely topic.

Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1999

ISBN: 0-380-97358-8

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999

Next book

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

Next book

HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE

The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...

A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.

Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.

The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017

Close Quickview