A readable but peculiar blend of fact and fiction aiming to give a visitors'-eye view of the 1939 New York World's Fair. Gelernter (Computer Science/Yale Univ.; The Muse in the Machine, not reviewed) argues that in exhibits like ``Futurama'' and ``Democracity'' the 1939 fair powerfully expressed a popular vision of what the future would be: a world in which each family owned its own house in a leafy town outside the city, to which Dad commuted for work by car over an enormous highway, while Mom stayed home in a house filled with labor-saving machinery. We lack the 1930s' faith in the future, he claims, because ``in 1970 or so we entered the American utopia'' and found it not quite to our liking. Gelernter hammers home this debatable point with a heavy hand and much repetition, but his theorizing can mostly be ignored in favor of his atmospheric descriptions of the fair itself—from the AT&T building, in which visitors could participate in a demonstration of long-distance phone calling (most exotic in 1939), to Westinghouse's Hall of Electric Living, complete with an automatic dishwasher. The author's generally perceptive analysis of how the fair expressed the 1930s worldview is interspersed with excerpts from a lengthy fictional diary entry recording a day spent at the fair by a young Jewish woman and her fiancÇ. This narrative gives a nice sense of how the fair must have struck contemporary visitors, although even readers who have missed the tiny Author's Note admitting that ``the characters are made up'' will soon realize that the clichÇd drama of Hortense Laura Glassman and Mark Handler is invented. Nothing very new here about a much-covered fair, and the author views the 1930s through glasses so rose-colored, he's practically blind to the decade's harsh realities. But good fun for pop culture aficionados. (author tour)
Pub Date: June 7, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-874002-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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