A standout in the monograph memoir subgenre, where subject guide meets personal essay.
A humorist unites a neophyte’s history of modern dance with his own unlikely dance memoir.
Participatory journalist Alford (Would It Kill You To Stop Doing That?: A Modern Guide to Manners, 2010, etc.) ponders the social functions of dance in the 20th century, using his own late-blooming passion as a guide to inquiry. After a mostly danceless youth—excepting cotillion lessons and bouncing from New England socialite balls to Studio 54 as a teenager, plus coming out in New York in the 1980s—the author first began obsessing over dance in his mid-50s. Zumba lessons and late-night living room sessions proved gateway drugs to more esoteric dance pleasures, including the “ecstatic dance” of 5Rhythms and “contact improv” (think Pilobolus), all of which occasioned a lot of touching and feeling, followed by aches and injuries. Alford finds material by immersing himself in curious situations and then filleting his experiences into wry narratives. He recounts his faltering steps toward proficiency with withering self-deprecation: “To admit that you’re a practitioner of the leaping arts is to open yourself to inspection on the fronts of economic status, carnality, taste, self-involvement, and body mass.” Along the way, the author folds in facts and anecdotes about legends such as Gene Kelly, an aggressive pugilist, and the winsome Arthur Murray, whose mail-order instructional footprints tutored many aspiring rug-cutters in the dance-crazed 1920s. Opinionated overviews of famous dancers, notable performances, choreography choices, and outmoded dance idioms make it nearly impossible to read the book without a search window open for video evidence (see the grizzly bear, the bunny hug, the cakewalk, Isadora Duncan). A keen self-editor adept at meeting word counts for magazine stories, Alford makes efficient use of the long form, refracting histories and theories of dance through his own hilarious escapades and tracing the darker themes of reluctance, humiliation, and shame involved in the medium in an effort to make sense of why we dance and watch others dance.
A standout in the monograph memoir subgenre, where subject guide meets personal essay.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2225-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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