Neoconservative gadfly Lind bites fiercely at right and left- -and just about every American institution in between. The author, executive editor of the National Interest, has garnered much attention with his articles on the decline of intellectual conservatism, immigration reform, and other touchy subjects. His first book will add fuel to several fires he's already set. Seeking to define the American character—a construct that seems increasingly abstract in the era of culture wars, canon reform, and the Republican Third Revolution—Lind traces the transformation of American society from its English origins to its multicultural present, a trajectory that he handles with all the depth of a junior-college survey course. He is more interesting when he moves into more controversial areas. Quoting Lyndon Johnson approvingly, he demands that the United States establish a policy of zero-net immigration and ask of would-be citizens, ``What can you do for our country?'' Defending his position at length, he decries conservative nativism and liberal relativism alike, arguing that unskilled immigration works to the disadvantage of the American underclass and benefits only the wealthy. He has unkind words for current smash-the-welfare-state dogma, remarking that ``the white overclass can afford to be indifferent to the decline of the wages and quality of life of the average American because its members have devised ways to insulate themselves from rotting cities, poor jobs, crumbling urban public schools, wandering maniacs, crime.'' No orthodoxy escapes Lind, whose text provides endless material for debate. His fondness for hyperbole and farfetched historical analogies sometimes undermines his arguments, and many readers will dismiss his simplistic call for a western European cultural ideal based on multiparty democracy and proportional representation as no more than a pipe dream. (For another look at redefining American identity, see David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America, p. 608.) Still, an intelligent albeit unfocused foray, far richer—and much worthier of serious consideration—than the usual polemic.
Pub Date: July 4, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-919103-3
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
SEEN & HEARD
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