Whither San Francisco? The way of all places, it seems, overrun by high tech and big money, the familiar villains of this oral history–based portrait.
By many accounts, San Francisco is the engine of a new kind of economy, one driven by young tech workers from all over the country who need only fast transportation and good bars to stay happy. What about the other workers? Writes documentary filmmaker McClelland, “as if radiating from San Francisco and Silicon Valley, economic pressures are pushing whole communities outward.” This is especially true of the elderly and the poorer working class, who simply cannot afford to live in the places where they work. Some of the older bohemian types whom the author interviews lament the passing of times when the place sported “a wild group of people…[who] knew that money doesn’t drive everything.” There are a few moneyed, techie types aboard, of course, including a pioneer of the self-driving car who has a cleareyed vision of “cool systems that bring us further as a society,” just as there are representatives of the various intellectual schools, mostly of the left, that have long characterized the region. Notes one, “a few hundred thousand professionals may think they make the Bay Area great, but they forget about all the people doing the other work," from cooking the food to driving the subway to taking care of the kids, all of whom could do better for their buck almost anywhere else in the country. The descriptions are long and the prescriptions few, but it’s striking how many of McClelland’s respondents, no matter what their work or background, are concerned with building a better, more equitable city. The book is firmly in the Studs Terkel tradition of first-person–based explorations of working-class life; if it lacks some of Terkel’s literary and sociological power, it’s still a solid contribution to popular urban studies.
Students of inequality and demographics will find powerful anecdotal evidence for how the changing cityscape brings both harm and good.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-60879-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Did you like this book?
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
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.
