An adoptive mother's agonizing account of her efforts to parent two troubled siblings. Loux (English/St. Mary's Coll.) challenges the notion that a nurturing environment can overcome genetic temperament and early deprivation. After giving birth to three healthy children, she and her husband decided that they would like to give a home to disadvantaged children. Dissuaded by the prejudices of their parents from embracing a biracial or Asian child, the Louxs adopted Margey and Dawn, three- and four-year-old white children from a local Catholic agency. From early on, the girls were unable to integrate successfully into the Loux family. As youngsters, their impulsive and erratic behavior impaired their ability to function in school or in any social context. Impetuous and reckless, both girls wrought havoc on the lives of the Louxs and their other children. As Margey entered her teens, she turned to drug abuse, lawlessness, and indiscriminate sex. She now works as a prostitute to support a drug habit and—despite stints in and out of jail—is, Loux says, ``much happier with her life than [when] she was living with our family, and probably happier now than in any of the scenarios I wanted for her.'' Dawn, too, left home early and is currently grappling with her young husband to raise two developmentally disabled children with minimal financial resources. Their mother contends that her harrowing experiences in raising ``hard to place'' children, whosebackgrounds were shielded from her, are far from unique. Loux questions the wisdom of adoptive policies that do not prepare parents for the realities of raising high-risk children and goes so far as to propose that children like Margey or Dawn might do better if raised in group homes. A forceful and disturbing memoir, but the reader doesn't get a full damage report on Margey's and Dawn's impact on the author's marriage and biological children.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8139-1710-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of Virginia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
