A sort of All the President’s Men for our time, and just the thing to lure bright young people into economics graduate...
The story of the century—the 21st, that is—is the ongoing financial crisis that has threatened to bring the developed world to its knees. Why business writers didn’t see it coming is the big question this collection of essays seeks to answer.
The collapse that led to the Great Recession came, writes Schiffrin (School of International and Public Affairs/Columbia Univ.), at a perfect-storm time for journalism, when collapsing advertising revenues and “the ensuing layoffs and staff cuts . . . made journalists fear for their jobs and perhaps more afraid to stand out from the rest of the pack.” And that was for the journalists who still had jobs, since some 30,000 nationwide had been eliminated, along with entire newspapers and magazines. Despite the generalized sense of guilt and shame about the failure to warn readers about the catastrophe, there was largely nothing to be done about it, since the business media had also become “embedded” inside Wall Street in the same way that war correspondents are embedded inside combat units. In these positions, the journalists were loath to report the unpleasant truths—if they were capable of doing so at all, given that few business reporters have the requisite understanding of economics to give a big-picture view of events by taking inches-thick reports home and reading between the lines to discern such startling revelations as, according to Washington Post writer Dan Froomkin, “the middle class may never be the same again” and “the hugely irresponsible financial sector remains unchastened.” Some contributors note external reasons for the failure of the business press, not least the obfuscations and outright lies of Wall Street. In all events, as New York Times writer Peter Goodman writes, it was hard to do deep interpretation and forecasting when “we had our hands full simply trying to make sense of the crush of events unfolding day after day.” Other contributors include Joseph Stiglitz and Barry Sussman.
A sort of All the President’s Men for our time, and just the thing to lure bright young people into economics graduate programs and journalism school—if only there were jobs waiting on the other end.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59558-549-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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