An essential document for anyone concerned with the unfolding constitutional crisis of the Trump presidency and one that...
The book that everyone’s been waiting for—and one guaranteed to raise as many questions as it answers.
The Mueller Report is in the public domain, but the Washington Post adds significant value to it with commentary, additional documents, and timelines. Reporters Marc Fisher and Sari Horwitz, for instance, provide a compare-and-contrast essay on the report’s principal, Robert Mueller, the former head of the FBI, who, like the ultimate subject of the report, Donald J. Trump, was raised in wealth and privilege but took a sharply different path of service: “At pivotal points in their lives, they made sharply divergent choices—as students, as draft-age men facing the dilemma of the Vietnam War, as ambitious alpha males deciding where to focus their energies.” Reporters Rosalind Helderman and Matt Zapotosky, who cover politics and the Justice Department respectively, write that the report was set in motion by “the commander-in-chief’s rage,” the result of having fired FBI Director James Comey for refusing to avow publicly that the president was not under investigation. The report identifies clear episodes of official obstructions of justice while being very careful in its language. For example, the report makes it quite clear that Mueller and his staff did not consider “collusion” itself a matter for investigation or prosecution, though the more technical charge “conspiracy to defraud the United States” was applied to former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. For all its redacted passages, the report provides specific context to other matters under investigation, including negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Russia: “[Michael] Cohen…discussed the Trump Moscow project with Ivanka Trump as to design elements…and Donald Trump Jr. (about his experience in Moscow and possible involvement in the project) during the fall of 2015—about which Trump responded to questioning under oath, “I vaguely remember press inquiries and media reporting during the campaign about whether the Trump Organization had business dealings in Russia.”
An essential document for anyone concerned with the unfolding constitutional crisis of the Trump presidency and one that helps make sense of current headlines.Pub Date: April 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982129-73-6
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2019
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
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