An above-average addition to the when-the-modern-age-began genre.
Did the modern world begin during World War I, in 1945, or perhaps with the steam engine in the 1700s? British historian Wilson (What Price Liberty!: How Freedom Was Won and Is Being Lost, 2009, etc.) makes an engrossing case for the dozen years after 1850.
That year marked the onset of a boom triggered, according to the author, by the free market that followed Britain’s abandonment of mercantilism and tariffs in the 1840s. Wilson begins in 1851 London, where the Great Exhibition drew enraptured crowds to a dazzling display of world technology (“a day at the Exhibition meant sensory overload”). Although dominated by Britain, there were unexpected hits from the United States, as well—e.g., Cyrus McCormick’s reaper, vulcanized rubber, and the Colt six-shooter. After this initial introduction, Wilson delivers 15 largely unrelated chapters on great midcentury events. The telegraph and railroad, after two decades of modest growth, exploded across the world and under the oceans, beginning a revolution in high-speed transport and telecommunications that is still in progress. An avalanche of gold, more from Australia than California, greased economies. Against their wills, Japan and China joined the world market as Britain and Russia built Asian empires—but not without early versions of another modern phenomenon, genocide, in India and the Caucasus. The U.S. boomed as it dissolved into civil war, which barely interrupted its expansion. The 1860s saw the U.S. replacing Britain as the center of attention in a world that “has been utterly transformed by war, mass migration, economic boom, advancing trade, and the impact of new technologies.” In his epilogue on the 1873 depression, the worst in history, Wilson emphasizes that the 1850s jump-started the modern world, which is more convenient and prosperous than the old but no nicer.
An above-average addition to the when-the-modern-age-began genre.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-06425-0
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Not flawless, but one of the best recent analyses of the contemporary woes of American economics and politics.
Remarkably comprehensive and coherent analysis of and prescriptions for America’s contemporary economic malaise by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Smith (Rethinking America, 1995, etc.).
“Over the past three decades,” writes the author, “we have become Two Americas.” We have arrived at a new Gilded Age, where “gross inequality of income and wealth” have become endemic. Such inequality is not simply the result of “impersonal and irresistible market forces,” but of quite deliberate corporate strategies and the public policies that enabled them. Smith sets out on a mission to trace the history of these strategies and policies, which transformed America from a roughly fair society to its current status as a plutocracy. He leaves few stones unturned. CEO culture has moved since the 1970s from a concern for the general well-being of society, including employees, to the single-minded pursuit of personal enrichment and short-term increases in stock prices. During much of the ’70s, CEO pay was roughly 40 times a worker’s pay; today that number is 367. Whether it be through outsourcing and factory closings, corporate reneging on once-promised contributions to employee health and retirement funds, the deregulation of Wall Street and the financial markets, a tax code which favors overwhelmingly the interests of corporate heads and the superrich—all of which Smith examines in fascinating detail—the American middle class has been left floundering. For its part, government has simply become an enabler and partner of the rich, as the rich have turned wealth into political influence and rigid conservative opposition has created the politics of gridlock. What, then, is to be done? Here, Smith’s brilliant analyses turn tepid, as he advocates for “a peaceful political revolution at the grassroots” to realign the priorities of government and the economy but offers only the vaguest of clues as to how this might occur.
Not flawless, but one of the best recent analyses of the contemporary woes of American economics and politics.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6966-8
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Never especially challenging or provocative but pleasant enough light reading.
Former Dirty Jobs star Rowe serves up a few dozen brief human-interest stories.
Building on his popular podcast, the author “tells some true stories you probably don’t know, about some famous people you probably do.” Some of those stories, he allows, have been subject to correction, just as on his TV show he was “corrected on windmills and oil derricks, coal mines and construction sites, frack tanks, pig farms, slime lines, and lumber mills.” Still, it’s clear that he takes pains to get things right even if he’s not above a few too-obvious groaners, writing about erections (of skyscrapers, that is, and, less elegantly, of pigs) here and Joan Rivers (“the Bonnie Parker of comedy”) there, working the likes of Bob Dylan, William Randolph Hearst, and John Wayne into the discourse. The most charming pieces play on Rowe’s own foibles. In one, he writes of having taken a soft job as a “caretaker”—in quotes—of a country estate with few clear lines of responsibility save, as he reveals, humoring the resident ghost. As the author notes on his website, being a TV host gave him great skills in “talking for long periods without saying anything of substance,” and some of his stories are more filler than compelling narrative. In others, though, he digs deeper, as when he writes of Jason Everman, a rock guitarist who walked away from two spectacularly successful bands (Nirvana and Soundgarden) in order to serve as a special forces operative: “If you thought that Pete Best blew his chance with the Beatles, consider this: the first band Jason bungled sold 30 million records in a single year.” Speaking of rock stars, Rowe does a good job with the oft-repeated matter of Charlie Manson’s brief career as a songwriter: “No one can say if having his song stolen by the Beach Boys pushed Charlie over the edge,” writes the author, but it can’t have helped.
Never especially challenging or provocative but pleasant enough light reading.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982130-85-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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