A welcome—though by no means essential—sociocultural study for the Beatlemaniac bookworm.
Sociological study of first-generation Beatles fans and how the Fab Four shaped ordinary Americans’ lives over a six-year period.
Sociologist and baby boomer Leonard manages to find a new angle of approach to the study of the Beatles. Her book is the latest testament to the seemingly infinite possibilities for commercial exploitation of the lads from Liverpool in the literary marketplace. However, instead of an opportunistic music critic spouting off on the Beatles’ multiform wonderfulness, here we get a cross section of the first generation of Beatles fans adding their own long-overdue opinions to this seemingly endless pop-cultural conversation. Although the book does have some of the unfortunate trappings of an average academic research project, Leonard mostly steers clear of convoluted classroom language and deluges of distracting footnotes to fashion an intermittently enlightening historical-cultural narrative of how the Beatles helped change America’s youth culture forever. The book is divided into chapters that cover a number of different important eras in Beatles history, beginning with the author’s pre-Beatlemania historical perspective on how “the events of the Kennedy sixties gave birth to a new sensibility, a new consciousness, at odds with the conformity and stifling constraint of the era.” The most engaging aspects of the book are not so much about the Beatles’ music widening an already expanding generation gap with their attitudes, hairstyles, clothes and sophisticated pop tunes; the value of the book hinges more on intergenerational comparisons and contrasts of how “Beatleness” affected members of the youth demographic, especially when it comes to differing gender perspectives on the Beatles’ music. Leonard also provides a helpful overall sense of how the average American Beatles fan not only accommodated the lightning-speed stylistic shifts in the band’s music from 1964 to 1970, but how these changes affected the decisions they made in their own personal lives.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62872-417-2
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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
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