Though the book may scare off almost as many prospective farmers as it encourages, the contributors argue their cases with...
Longtime advocates of sustainable agriculture join with new voices for a comradely take on the challenging future of farming.
Edited by Stone Barns Center communications director Hodgkins (editor: The Field Guide to the Nature Conservancy, 2003, etc.), with illustrations by Wormell, the title is a riff on Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. The anthology features contributions by a host of professional and nonprofessional writers with close ties to, or an abiding affinity for, the land, and many of the pieces read rather like a special section of Mother Jones, with a characteristic political slant. The core of the book is an ode to agricultural landscapes and heritage that registers concerns about “feeding people, fostering community, sustaining livelihoods, restoring soil, sequestering carbon, protecting natural systems and reconnecting us to the land.” It is also shot through with cautionary tales about the folly of large-scale corporate farming, misguided government programs, the graying of the American farmer, and the precipitous decline in their numbers. But the warnings are balanced by plausible strategies for reforming our food system, practical advice, and optimism regarding farming's future in this noble, difficult field. If occasionally the optimism smacks of wishful thinking, its tenets still may be pivotal in dealing with global ecological change. Some writers rail against the use of chemicals and high-productivity farming that depletes the soil, while others recognize that us-versus-them rancor serves no one and that educated, demanding consumers as well as small-scale farmers can help the big boys see the light (and the rest of us eat more healthily). The themes of the collection make repetition inescapable, which can get tiresome, though many of the less didactic pieces are lovely—e.g., Mas Masumoto's lyrical letter to his farmer daughter. Other notable contributors include Barbara Kingsolver, Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, Alice Waters, Temple Grandin, Michael Pollan, Rick Bayless, and Marion Nestle.
Though the book may scare off almost as many prospective farmers as it encourages, the contributors argue their cases with an effective polemical tenor.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61689-530-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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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