The former police commissioner of New York City tells all. Bratton grew up in working-class Dorchester, outside Boston, and from childhood on was obsessed with the idea of becoming a police officer. By the time he was in his early 30s, Bratton had worked his way up from beat cop to second in command of the Boston police force. Even back then, his ambitions got him in trouble with the mayor (as they later would with New York's Rudy Giuliani), and he was transferred to a new post overseeing transit cops. Bratton became an expert in the field and came to new York in 1990 to head up the city's transit police, a job he loved. He got the transit cops a little respect and instituted a successful method of quickly arresting and processing turnstile- jumpers—who often commit crimes on the subway. He returned briefly to Boston to become police commissioner, then came back to New York in 1994 to fill the same position there. The marriage between Bratton and newly elected mayor Giuliani was uneasy from the start, and Bratton's instant popularity caused friction. The top cop claimed from day one that he would reduce crime and immediately instituted ideas that he credits partially to James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, authors of a 1992 groundbreaking study on community policing. As any New Yorker could attest, crime did go down and the quality of life improved. But who should receive credit for these changes became a political issue, which ended with Bratton's resignation after 27 months. While much of the second half of the book is caught up in a political showdown that might be of limited interest to those outside the Big Apple, Bratton does have a lot to say about police and society, how to respond to issues regarding race, and how to keep New York's finest precisely that. For a man often accused of grandstanding, Bratton (with the help of James Carville's and Mary Matalin's coauthor Knobler) has written a surprisingly readable and reasonable book.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-45251-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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
SEEN & HEARD
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