Moments of exuberant power, but Matthews too often stumbles over his own sentences.
Debut memoir relates the author’s struggles with a mixed-race identity, his family’s battles with poverty and his search for a profoundly schizophrenic mother who disappeared during his infancy.
Matthews, whose father worked for a variety of black publications in Baltimore, shows remarkable energy and imagination, as well as appealing self-deprecation, in his tale of success erected on a foundation of failure. Ralph Matthews “stole” his son from his estranged wife, who promptly decamped for Israel, never to return. The ensuing years featured deepening poverty, declining fortunes and an abusive stepmother who stabbed David with a fork and put his head through drywall. The author easily passed for white through much of his childhood and youth, telling the curious—and there were many—that he was Jewish, Lebanese, Palestinian, whatever they would believe. He stumbled through elementary school, dropped out of high school, watched a lot of TV, read a lot of books. He attached himself to the neighborhood stud, whose father taught martial arts and kept firearms around the house. After much difficulty, Matthews began to take his life more seriously, obtaining a GED and attending college. When he finally contacted his mother’s family, he learned she had died. His reminiscences include the obligatory sexual coming-of-age stuff, some of it sordid; he renders the almost equally obligatory drug-deal-gone-bad sequence in screenplay format. The tone throughout is ironic and playful, but often overwrought as well. Usage and grammatical errors include dangling constructions and inappropriate pronoun cases. The author sends ten-dollar words to do ten-cent jobs, and his vocabulary sometimes exceeds his comprehension (he should check the definition of soupçon). He also employs clichés. Opening an envelope containing the first photo he’s ever seen of his mother, must he have a lump in his throat?
Moments of exuberant power, but Matthews too often stumbles over his own sentences.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-8050-8149-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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
SEEN & HEARD
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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