An occasionally amusing and insightful but scattershot exploration of midlife woes.
Calhoun (Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give, 2017, etc.) argues that Generation X women find middle age harder than those older or younger.
The author is in her 40s and not enjoying this stage of life. In her latest, she offers a combination of her memories, recycled research, and interviews with “women who, by virtue of being middle class, grew up with reasonable expectations of opportunity and success.” Calhoun is far more successful when she focuses on the problems of being a middle-aged American woman than when she attempts to define the nebulous differences between baby boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials and to convince readers that Gen Xers are suffering in ways that those older and younger aren't and won't. She defines Gen Xers as those born between 1965 and 1980 (data supplied by the Pew Research Center). On the basis of scanty evidence, Calhoun identifies them as being latchkey kids and children of divorce and hampered by receiving “two primary messages” from their childhoods as the offspring of overly optimistic feminist mothers: “One: Reach for the stars. Two: You're on your own.” The author argues, for example, that Gen X kids were uniquely scarred by being witnesses to the Challenger spaceship disaster, neglecting to acknowledge that other generations—if generations can even be separated so neatly—had their own public traumas. Much of the book is devoted to demonstrating the suffering of “her” generation: “Gen X women undergo a bone-deep, almost hallucinatory panic about money,” she writes, blaming this alleged state of mind on the fact that “much of Gen X graduated into a weak job market.” Calhoun is on firmer ground when she discusses the stressors that affect middle-aged women in general: menopause and the physical changes that precede it, the challenges of dealing with older (and less appreciative) children and aging parents, and the fact that aging inevitably means that some life choices are no longer viable.
An occasionally amusing and insightful but scattershot exploration of midlife woes.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4785-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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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