Decent writing, bad luck, terrible timing.
A political reporter documents the campaign he thought would decide the presidency.
Occasionally in the sports section one reads an account of a baseball game that the reporter, rushing to make a deadline, wrote while the game was still in process. Normally this is no big deal, but occasionally something happens at the last minute that changes everything. The result is an article describing how the Red Sox marched to victory, capped by a paragraph saying something like, “and then the Yankees scored five runs and won.” That is the sensation one gets when reading Washington Post political reporter Milbank’s account of the 2000 presidential campaign. Poor Milbank spent two years following the campaigns and had his chronicle substantially complete by election day, expecting only to have to add a final chapter—not available at the time of this review—telling us that either Bush or Gore had won. So much for that plan. In the rush to print, there was never going to be much time for hindsight anyway: More than a retrospective analysis, this is really a compendium of the articles Milbank wrote about the campaigns, placed in roughly chronological order. But given the post–Election Day fiasco, the strategy is a disaster. The author’s thesis is that the employment of “smashmouth” politics (hard-hitting, “dirty,” combative tactics) is both good for democracy and necessary for a candidate to succeed—but his story takes place before any of the real mouth-smashing began. His attempts to make the campaign look more exciting than it was, mostly unfulfilled promises of sexual titillation, thus end up sounding silly. And the carnival atmosphere he strains to create rings phony, given that the carnival was only about to get started. Instead of an account of how two years on the campaign trail influenced what happened next, we get what sound like willfully blind irrelevancies.
Decent writing, bad luck, terrible timing.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-465-04590-1
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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