An exciting reassessment of the global economy that provocatively extends the frontiers of the feminist critique.
A Swedish political and economic writer shows why “feminism’s best-kept secret is just how necessary a feminist perspective is in the search for a solution to our mainstream economic problems.
Marçal, lead editorial writer for the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, begins with the definition of the “economic man” first posited by Adam Smith and then refined by the Chicago school of economics in the 1950s. The so-called economic man is a rational individual calculating and pursuing his own self-interest, in constant competition with others. For Marçal, the one-dimensional Chicago definition is a “caricature.” Though he may not be “like us…he clearly has emotions, depths, fears and dreams that we can completely identify with.” For her, human identity can only be constructed in relation to others. The economic man is totally dependent because he must compete to prove to himself that he is worthwhile. He is also “aggressive and narcissistic. And he lives in conflict with himself,” nature, and others, defining himself by what he is not. His primary characteristic, writes the author, is “that he is not a woman. Economics has only one sex.” Where men act out of supposed self-interest, “woman has been assigned the task of caring for others, not of maximizing her own gain.” This includes cooking, cleaning, raising children, and other unpaid activities that do not result in the production of exchangeable goods. “Women's work,” she writes, “is a natural resource that we don't think we need to account for…we assume it will always be there.” However, to function well, a society must have people, knowledge, and trust, all resources made possible by unpaid domestic work. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky debunked the Chicago caricature nearly 40 years ago, but it persists. Marçal takes up the cudgels to propose that we “wave economic man off from the platform and then build an economy and a society with room for a great spectrum of what it means to be human.”
An exciting reassessment of the global economy that provocatively extends the frontiers of the feminist critique.Pub Date: June 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-142-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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