A smartly stitched quilt of Americana that could use a bit more color, by a talented essayist (Stolen Words, 1989, etc.) and novelist (Aurora 7, 1990, etc.). Some of these pieces are culled, with minor changes, from The American Spectator, The Yale Review, and Southwest Review. Mallon decided to explore his subjects in ``an attitude of active passivity''; what results is first-rate but frustratingly neutral (for the most part) reporting on 12 ``spectacles''— divided, sometimes awkwardly, into six matched pairs. The author watches the shuttle Discovery blast off, and then writes about ``ad hoc, can-do little Poker Flats,'' a quasi-private rocket-launching site in Alaska. A lengthy account of a bank-robbery trial is twinned with a report on the impending execution of killer Robert Alton Harris, while a piece on a Rhode Island senatorial election goes with an account of a day with Dan Quayle (in a typical pinpoint description, Mallon calls the Veep ``a sweet, miniature creature in a Republican petting zoo''). The 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor rides alongside a funny account of bumbling at the UN; a description of a rodeo is married to one of a local-hero festival in Michigan; a visit to the Sundance Film Festival precedes a report on the disposal of the late Rex Harrison's possessions (Mallon bought the actor's leaky oak-and-silver wine bucket). The best essays are clever and combative, filled with the jabs and jigs of Mallon's book-length nonfiction: The UN piece ridicules that institution as a ``toy'' world spouting ``sweetened Newspeak''; the spaceflight essays plump for a manned Mars mission; Sundance is exposed as a mannered farce. Otherwise, Mallon seems content to stay in the background, and the pieces suffer, becoming well-crafted Sunday magazine fare, without real bite. Not enough fireworks in these spectacles. Anything Mallon turns out is good—but he can do better than this.
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1993
ISBN: 0-89919-939-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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