A gripping work that startles, entertains, enlightens—and raises important questions about the nature of history, and of...
An Italian CNN journalist visits vestigial settlements of whites who have lingered in some of the world’s most remote areas long after the colonial era ended.
Near the end of this remarkable collection of essays, Orizio states what has become obvious: “Everyone clings to history, but no one admits to knowing exactly what history is.” He was referring to a group of people on Guadeloupe called the Blancs Matignone—deeply impoverished remnants of some French colonialists during the Napoleonic era who decided to head for the hills instead of for home. And in the hills they remain, eking out a living and claiming kinship to the Bourbons and to Prince Rainier. The author found much the same everywhere he looked: people, for the most part, with no written histories but with deeply held convictions about their importance in the world and, in some cases, with ludicrous notions of racial superiority. He begins in Sri Lanka, where some sad descendants of Dutch burghers cling to memory as firmly as infants cleave to their mothers. Then it’s off to Jamaica, where live some Germans, whose ancestors arrived in the mid-19th century. One of the most intriguing groups are the remains of some Confederates from the US Civil War who now live in Brazil. Called Confederados, they once numbered perhaps as many as 20,000. Their little church houses a life-size portrait of Robert E. Lee. “Their dream,” writes Orizio, “was to reshape a Dixieland far from modern temptations.” In Haiti, he finds what’s left of some Polish settlers who arrived 200 years ago. Though they have intermarried with the black population, they keep themselves separate—and know the polka. Some, says Orizio, have arresting blue eyes. In Namibia are some people called Basters, folks who descend from Dutch and Hottentot ancestry. They complain of Eden lost and dream of a homeland.
A gripping work that startles, entertains, enlightens—and raises important questions about the nature of history, and of humanity.Pub Date: July 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1197-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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
SEEN & HEARD
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