Largely predictable, but gracefully stated.
To visit fear on an already suffering world, writes the 1986 Nobel Prize–winner, is a naked assault on human dignity and “a prelude to the domination of the mind and the triumph of power.”
These days, Soyinka (The Open Sore of a Continent, 1996, etc.) argues, there’s plenty more afoot to fear than fear itself, which makes our time just right for warmongers, theocrats, absolutists, and other blights on humanity. Made up of five lectures given at London’s Royal Institution in March 2004, Soyinka’s latest wanders the boundary between memoir and political essay. Early on, he ranges among memories of resisting the military government in his native Nigeria during the Biafran war, of marching with Bertrand Russell (“a pipe-smoking leprechaun of a man with a giant brain”) against nuclear testing, of waiting out natural firestorms in Los Angeles. He then turns to broader world events; he recalls thinking, for instance, that if the world changed on September 11, 2001, then it also changed in 1988, when Pan Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, and a year later, when a UTA passenger flight exploded over Niger. Also the result of sabotage, that last-named disaster was greeted by worldwide silence and “swallowed with total equanimity by African heads of state.” Fear and terror are our daily lot, Soyinka suggests, with dehumanizing effects. To combat this assault on our shared humanity, the world community must repudiate the notion that there are no innocents today while, at the same time, reaching out to ameliorate the conditions that produce terrorism in the first place among people who are probably innocents. Such remedies are sound but vague. In the place of completely thought-through prescriptions, Soyinka offers generalities: the al Qaeda attack on the US was a crime against humanity, the US shouldn’t have rushed into war in Iraq, and so on.
Largely predictable, but gracefully stated.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8129-7424-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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
SEEN & HEARD
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