These sharp, amusing pieces confirm Hiaasen’s status as a bird so rare—the humorous popular novelist with an acutely...
A second helping of dry wit and gale-force malice from South Florida’s native Ambrose Bierce.
While Hiaasen remains known as a bestselling crime novelist (Sick Puppy, 1999, etc.), he’s also gained attention since 1985 with his twice-weekly column for the Miami Herald, first anthologized in Kick Ass (1999). This second collection dovetails equally well with his fiction, providing factual depictions of the many social controversies and fiascoes that inspire his novel-parodies. As the title implies, most of the material here centers on the malign yet absurd forces that have overwhelmed the Sunshine State. As Hiaasen realizes, many of these issues—overdevelopment, municipal corruption, gun proliferation, human naïveté in the face of nature—are occurring on a national level. Most of his columns either address their subjects via deadpan reportage laced with energetic mockery (“Florida’s new [1987] handgun law, also known as the Mortician’s Relief Act, officially makes us the most dangerous state in America”) or descend enthusiastically into the outright satire of his fiction. From a 1998 column entitled “A Few Minutes at City Hall”: “Old Business: Bi-Monthly Firing of City Manager. . . . Another recess is called while the Key to the City is presented to actor Sylvester Stallone.” While the persistence of crass corruption in South Florida draws many such zingers (as does the recent Florida-centered election fiasco), Hiaasen clearly understands and addresses the big picture: the way an intractable tangle of such problems has accelerated the degradation of Florida’s once-pristine natural resources and the disappearance of its genuine rural culture. Other favorite targets include the religious and cultural right, hack politicians who cynically exploit homophobia and racial tensions, and the banality and hypocrisy beneath Florida’s sunny civic facade of athletics and theme parks.
These sharp, amusing pieces confirm Hiaasen’s status as a bird so rare—the humorous popular novelist with an acutely critical social perspective—that he’s practically an endangered species.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14791-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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