Ranks low in solid analysis but high in anecdotal evidence.
A wonderfully entertaining look at society’s ambivalent attitudes about wives.
Canadian journalist Kingston points out that wife, not hooker, is the oldest profession, but the idea of what constitutes a wife is full of contradictions and ambiguities, at least in Western society. Drawing on a wealth of material garnered from movies, television, books, newspapers, and magazines, she looks at the many facets of wifedom: wife-to-be, working wife, abused wife, trophy wife, power wife, ex-wife. The perpetuation by the “wedding industrial complex” of the myth of the modern bride as fairy-tale heroine, the romanticizing of domesticity by the media in the 1990s (think Martha Stewart), the justifications for spousal-abuse retaliation, the economic value of a wife, the financial repercussions of divorce—all are explored with a host of examples, mostly from pop culture, but also from interviews with wives, ex-wives, and other experts. A chapter on ex-wives shows us the calculated and joyous revenge of the jilted wives in Olivia Goldsmith’s The First Wives Club, the wrath of Medea, and the real-life rage of Betty Broderick, a middle-aged American woman who, in 1989, shot her ex-husband and his new young wife as they lay sleeping. This mix is typical of Kingston’s approach. “Unwives,” as she dubs unattached women, also get her attention, with Sex and the City providing a fantasy view and interviews with real women showing another side. Well-padded with stories about famous and infamous wives, including Princess Diana, Hillary Clinton, Lorena Bobbit, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a slew of heroines from novels and TV sitcoms, the book is pleasantly amusing, wonderfully readable, and sometimes thought-provoking. Not surprisingly, Kingston concludes that there is no singular meaning of wife, but the trip she takes getting to that conclusion is definitely a diverting one.
Ranks low in solid analysis but high in anecdotal evidence.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-20510-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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