Thoughtful, timely reading, both intelligent and humane.
How capitalism has transformed modern giving into an act that erases rather than restores human dignity.
Philanthropy means “love of humanity,” writes journalist and academic Schiller. However, in our 21st-century Gilded Age, “charitable appeals are not about actual people.” Instead, they turn human beings “into ciphers, uncomplicated representations of desperation and vulnerability.” This approach stems from the early Christian view that philanthropy was a personal virtue, as opposed to the ancient world’s understanding of it as a civic responsibility. Schiller argues that contemporary philanthropic philosophies combine this early Christian idea with a capitalist ethos that judges the poor worthy of the basics for physical survival, but not necessarily of “a quality of life far beyond sustenance, into [opportunities] to excel, create.” Terms such as “social entrepreneurship” and “philanthrocapitalism,” embodied by in the charitable work of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and other “self-important yet small-minded” business owners, frame giving as a form of investment. Schiller sees only a few exceptional philanthropists aware of social inequality, including MacKenzie Scott and LeBron James. However, even they are subject to the inexorable power of capitalism because their giving does not address the uneven power relations that give rise to structural inequality. The author wants to replace the utilitarian ethos underlying philanthropy with a more humanistic one, ideally in conjunction with a government committed to offering basic sustenance to all. Offering meaningful ways for everyone to give—as Joseph Pulitzer did in 1885 when he asked working-class New Yorkers to contribute to a Statue of Liberty pedestal fund—would also enhance public commitment to broader social well-being. Schiller presents a hopeful vision of philanthropy and society designed to enable all human beings to fully participate in all of life’s pleasures, including the uniquely human capacity for imagination, creativity, and cooperation.
Thoughtful, timely reading, both intelligent and humane.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781685890223
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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