A well-written and intriguing, if not always convincing, exploration of America’s political future.
A mathematician examines the ideal sizes for nations and the consequences of becoming too large.
“For nations,” this nonfiction book begins, “size matters.” Large nations, it argues, can spend more on militaries, manipulate economies, and spread the costs of public services across an extensive group of taxpayers. While these benefits are ubiquitous across huge, successful nations, there are a number of counterexamples throughout history of countries that became too big, as the more people a land encompasses, “the more potential for conflict.” To Lockwood, given the societal tensions that have plagued America for the past two decades, the United States may be on that path. A former faculty member of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, he is the author of multiple books that examine complex social phenomena through mathematical analysis. This study follows that tradition. In dissecting post–World War II case studies, it examines categories such as the cost of national defense, free trade, and income inequality to quantify the ideal size for a nation. Drawing on examples of “rightsizing” from European empires that decolonized or nations that partitioned (such as India and Pakistan), Lockwood explores “the trade-offs between size and consensus.” He evaluates the various “rightsizing” strategies, such as partition, annexation, and decentralization. As painful as these options may be, the author argues, they are superior to the alternative approach whereby the central government takes a more authoritarian turn in defending national wealth (models pursued, for instance, by Russia and China). Backed by impressive research that includes a 12-page bibliography and more than 280 endnotes, this book makes an effective abstract case for the idyllic size of a theoretical nation. Lockwood breaks down a complex analysis into accessible prose designed for a general readership. Yet when this formula is applied to the U.S., the volume’s preference for a “peaceful divorce” over a “forced union” will make many readers uncomfortable in its echoing of far-right fringe rhetoric. Decentralization is one thing, but a national divorce opens a myriad of logistical impracticalities that are left unaddressed in the work’s assessment.
A well-written and intriguing, if not always convincing, exploration of America’s political future.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781632996336
Page Count: 198
Publisher: River Grove Books
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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