Resolutely, proudly left wing/radical/anarchic with an exuberant optimism that usually keeps the tendentious text aloft.
A professor and social activist for Occupy Wall Street rehearses the history of OWS and of democracy and argues for a more “horizontal” approach to political decision-making.
Graeber (Anthropology/Goldsmiths College, Univ. of London; Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011) describes himself as an anarchist with a small a. He proceeds by moving through the pasture of democratic history and dispatching one sacred cow after another. Among his points: The Founding Fathers didn’t really want democracy; the American economy is designed to keep everyone in debt; organizations with leaders—and with top-down management—can never be democratic; the media are clueless yet wield enormous influence; capitalism doesn’t work; the current American political system is hopelessly corrupt and needs a revolutionary change. Such a change, he argues, was the Occupy movement, in which he was deeply involved, though not, of course, as a leader. Graeber’s text is a mixture of social and economic history, rages against the machine, political judgments (he’s deeply disappointed in President Barack Obama, whom he calls “a moderate conservative”), Q-and-A–style rhetoric and even some professorial pronouncements. His “horizontal democracy” notion is that there are no leaders; groups attempt to reach consensus with only a “facilitator”—one who does not contribute or comment but just moves things along; everyone has the veto power. The groups eschew formal voting and divide into smaller units for nettlesome problems and decisions. The author even offers advice for how to deal with disruptive folks who just won’t get with the program.
Resolutely, proudly left wing/radical/anarchic with an exuberant optimism that usually keeps the tendentious text aloft.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9356-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A multivocal treatment well suited to the complex and dappled life of one of America's premier modern poets. Members of Bishop's wide circle of friends from literature and the arts (among them John Ashbery, Robert Giroux, Helen Muchnic, Anne Stevenson, Ned Rorem, and James Laughlin) recall with eloquence the poet's intelligence, her reserve, her anxiety, and her peculiar intensity through the stages and stories of her accomplished and troubled life. Born to a mentally ill mother and a father who died when she was eight months old, Bishop (19111979) spent her early years living with family members in Worcester, Boston, and Great Village, Mass. Recollections by her childhood friends reveal a very intelligent but odd personality—shy, and often embarrassed or pained by common experiences. Several contributors comment, however, on the order, discipline, and companionship she found at the Walnut Hill School between 1927 and '30; there she began to write plays, short stories, book reviews, and poetry for the school's magazine. From her Vassar days, Bishop is remembered for her strong mind, arch wit, sometimes taciturn demeanor, and her talent for writing. With Mary McCarthy and others, she launched the alternative literary magazine Con Spirito, which created a sensation on campus and brought her to the notice of the Ivy League literati of the time, eventually yielding an introduction to poet Marianne Moore. After graduating from college, Bishop traveled to New York, Europe, Key West, and Rio de Janeiro, and through several lesbian love relationships, the most sustained of which with Lota de Macedo Soares. Friends recall these adult years as difficult, sometimes drunken, but also rewarding for Bishop as a person and a poet. After her lover's death in 1967, Bishop's life took shape around a series of teaching appointments at the University of Washington, Harvard, and finally New York University. Although a few of Fountain's (English dept. chairman at Miss Porter's School) and Brazeau's (Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, 1983) transitions push too hard, the portrait of the poet this oral biography creates is, finally, absorbing and at times beautiful and graced with artfulness.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-87023-936-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
A liberal tries to straddle the fence, in a harsh, often trite polemic geared to enrage multiculturalists, feminists, affirmative activists, and others. Even liberals who secretly harbor doubts about whether a lack of ethnic pride is what underlies the difficulties of black children in school will find little succor from Henry (a Pulitzer Prize winner and a columnist for Time who died this summer at the age of 44). Even those who criticize the belief that all values and ideas are equally worthy will be offended by his writing, regarding the relative worth of cultures, ``It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.'' In defending elitism as an individualist philosophy that demands the best from each person and rewards those with the greatest achievements, Henry slaughters every sacred cow of the left. Affirmative action, he claims, is as unfair to its beneficiaries as it is to white men, breeding doubt in minority employees whether they were hired for their abilities or to fill a quota. As for feminism, ``forty-six percent of the nation's financial managers are women,'' so what are they still griping about, he wonders. Educated mothers should stay home: ``A live-in nanny clearly represents an intellectual step down for the child,'' since she is probably not college-educated. (But even card-carrying feminists will relish his quotes from some rather laughable scholarly feminist works, for instance, one about the impact of ``masculinism'' on the study of geography.) The gaps in Henry's logic are often glaring. He believes in equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome, but he wants less academically successful students to be tracked into vocational education at an early age. And in espousing Oregon's health-care reform package—which even the Bush administration rejected as discriminatory against the disabled—on the grounds that some lives are more valuable to society than others, Henry begs the whole question of the worth of human life. An infuriating screed that will alienate even those liberals seeking a coherent and well-argued defense of intellectual rigor and reward for merit.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-46899-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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