A hopeful view of America’s uncertain future.
The longest-serving independent politician chronicles his ongoing fight for progressive legislation.
Following up his previous books urging a progressive agenda, Vermont Sen. Sanders (Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution, 2017, etc.) recounts his activities from June 14, 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the party’s nomination, ending his own presidential campaign, to Aug. 25, 2018, when the Democratic National Committee approved a major reform that eliminated superdelegates from impacting the first ballot at a presidential convention. Besides dealing with the intractable Trump administration, the author regrets that he faces lack of knowledge and, often, interest among the populace. “Political consciousness in the United States is low,” he writes. “Many people don’t vote, while many others don’t have a clue as to which political party controls the Senate or the House.” He faults “corporate media”—profit-making entities controlled by the wealthy—for disseminating biased information. Even on mainstream TV, though, he is never asked about “the dynamics of wealth and power that shape our nation” or about health care or income inequality, but instead about Trump’s latest tweet or a recent disaster. To counter these narrow perspectives, on Jan. 23, 2018, Sanders convened a 90-minute town hall meeting, which presented several panels discussing health care before an audience of around 450 people; the event was streamed online, reaching about 1 million viewers. The author includes speeches he has delivered around the country and excerpts from interviews in diarylike entries that focus on issues such as taxation, the environment, education, criminal justice, gun control, immigration, military spending, and foreign policy. He underscores his belief that change “never comes from the top on down, but always from the grassroots on up.” He is heartened by recent primary victories: mayoral candidate Ben Jealous in Maryland, for example, and congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York. With hundreds of progressive candidates emerging in the 2018 races, he believes voters will reinvigorate a nation “that resonates with love, hope, and prosperity.”
A hopeful view of America’s uncertain future.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-16326-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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