A much-needed complement to the left’s focus on rentier capitalism.
A Marxist interpretation of the housing crisis in Britain.
In these essays, Gotby, author (They Call It Love) and housing activist, indicts capitalism, the capitalist state, and white bourgeois ideology for their role in perpetuating and profiting from the lack of affordable and quality housing for poor and working-class people. Housing, she claims, is “at the core of…all the things that go into ensuring the relative wellbeing of people.” The wealthy excepted, well-being is degraded by a housing market that treats the home as a financial asset, the privatization of council housing, and a dominant ideology that locates safety, health, and care in bourgeois domesticity and homeownership—i.e., in the private, not the public, sphere. Yet she cautions against pining for a time when the welfare state was more robust. The welfare state was as much a bailout of capitalism’s neglect of the social reproduction of the proletariat as it was a help for people in need, while council housing never addressed the variety of living arrangements that people desire. Ideally, housing should be collective, and the caring functions associated with the family spread across institutional settings. Regarding the latter, Gotby points out that the family (contrary to bourgeois ideology) can be a “site of intense exploitation, violence, and alienation.” Throughout, she emphasizes people’s emotional attachment to housing and, in the final essay, how feelings contribute to the housing movement. Argumentative and impressionistic, the book combines Marxism and feminism to offer an aspirational perspective on how to think about housing and ways to overcome the current and prevent future crises. Gotby, though, does not call for revolution and an end to capitalism. Rather, her dream is housing that exists beyond capitalism’s reach, a goal even she recognizes as utopian.
A much-needed complement to the left’s focus on rentier capitalism.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781804296219
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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