Flannery (The Future Eaters, not reviewed), a mammologist at home in the field, reports on his researches in a distinctly remote patch of upcountry New Guinea, which is about as upcountry as you can get. This is natural history in the raw, where personal comfort and safety take a backseat to the thrill of trooping about in those rare blank spots on the zoological map. Flannery, who has carried out scientific work throughout Oceania, concentrates here on Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya, lands that routinely serve up new species of mammals to expeditions. In a vaguely old-fogey tone (“My first memories of Port Moresby are still vivid” and “There is one case I will never forget”), he recounts slogging and slashing his way toward Goodfellow’s tree-kangaroo, which dwells in the treetops of New Guinea’s oak forest, or a King of Saxony bird of paradise (Flannery may be a mammologist, but it’s with birds that he finds his most evocative encounters). He casually drops comments like, “I was recovering from cerebral malaria at the time”; he carries out rude surgery in the wild; he makes the obligatory visit to an outhouse full of colossal hairy spiders. A python throws its coils around him (“I watched in amazement as my hand became miraculously attached to my knee”), and he is mortally threatened more than once by natives who resent his presence. Flannery paces his narrative well, and makes his book that much more valuable by detailing the quirks and everyday lives of the local people he works with. He ends the book with an intelligent, well-versed, and scathing critique of Indonesian malfeasance in Irian Jaya. A chronicle of fieldwork in places so untouched they feel out of time. How salutary it is to learn simply that such landscapes still exist! (16 pages color photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-87113-731-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
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
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