A carefully researched work of history that chronicles centuries of injustice while calling for an end to inequality.
A historical examination of the origins of the ever-deepening divide between Black and white intergenerational wealth.
As Arizona State University historian Schermerhorn notes, “The typical African American family has about one-sixth the wealth of the typical white family.” This is an improvement over the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, when “the typical Black family had less than two cents on the typical white family’s dollar,” but the structural reasons for the disparity have remained fairly constant: institutional racism stood in the way of accumulating wealth then, and it does so today. Schermerhorn ranges across American history to note that whenever Blacks have made economic advances, new impediments arise: a Black household in colonial Virginia was subject to twice the annual tax of a white household of the same composition, while the descendants of landholders were legally cheated out of inherited holdings because, as a court said of one, the heir “was a Negro and by consequence an alyen.” In the newly constituted United States, enslaved Blacks were legally classified “as personal property, like a horse or wagon,” with no property rights of their own. Schermerhorn finds broad discrepancies in New Deal programs, with Social Security, for instance, initially denied to farmworkers and domestic workers—a large portion, that is, of the Black workforce—while post–WWII GI Bill programs were so tilted that in 1947, “just two of 3,229 VA-backed loans in thirteen Mississippi cities went to Black veterans.” Housing covenants in the Phoenix and Los Angeles of the 1950s and ’60s confined Blacks to the inner city and low housing values, impeding the accumulation of wealth. Schermerhorn closes with a call to redress four centuries of economic damage with “targeted restorative justice initiatives” that include reparations.
A carefully researched work of history that chronicles centuries of injustice while calling for an end to inequality.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780300258950
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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