A book that will undoubtedly stir discussion—as many of Cowen’s books do—with readers divided about how they stand based on...
An influential economist seeks to persuade readers that American citizens have gotten overly complacent, that a crisis point is near, and that a widespread rebellion may alter the existing order.
Using data from a variety of sources, extrapolating from that data, and mixing in large dollops of admitted speculation, Cowen (Chair, Economics/George Mason Univ.; Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation, 2013, etc.) claims that the population at large is resisting changes in the economy that could improve the social order. The author, who runs Marginal Revolution, “the “most-read economics blog worldwide,” divides the population into three complacent categories: “The Privileged Class,” who are comfortable and usually wealthy; “Those Who Dig In,” roughly equivalent to the traditional middle class; and “Those Who Got Stuck,” who, Cowen maintains, have pretty much given up trying to rise economically and socially (many were never given the chance to do so). The author focuses on a variety of issues, including the downturn in Americans moving to different regions to seek improvement, increased racial and/or ethnic segregation, decreased innovation in the business sector, stagnation within pop culture, and failure to challenge authority in an organized manner. As he builds his argument against complacency, Cowen regularly employs metaphors and analogies that help illuminate his positions; he is a skilled stylist and polished debater. In the final analysis, though, whether he is persuasive will depend heavily on how willing readers will be to accept sweeping generalizations about the American populace. In conclusion, Cowen describes how a dynamic society should look and feel, and then he shifts his pessimism about the present to a sort of ersatz optimism about the future, when current structures collapse and chaos improves American democracy.
A book that will undoubtedly stir discussion—as many of Cowen’s books do—with readers divided about how they stand based on where they currently sit.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-10869-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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