Thoughtful and thought-provoking, but, with only the most tenuous connections linking the various pieces, it seems little...
A powerful if uneven collection of essays on the New Economy and the changes it’s wrought.
New Yorker editor Remnick (Lenin’s Tomb, 1994, etc.) has gathered 33 illuminating glimpses into the lives of entrepreneurs, businesspeople, socialites, as well as some less visible members of our age—the struggling actor who won $45 million in the New York State Lottery, for instance, and the mother of four who was the girlfriend of the largest heroin distributor in the Bronx. The result is an entertaining and thoughtful compendium of profiles. There’s Joan Didion’s “Everywoman.com.,” which claims Martha Stewart as the ideal of “female power,” conquering Wall Street by teaching housewives everywhere to make ornate (and costly) doilies; there’s Ken Auletta’s assessment of Bill Gates, which sees him not as a capitalist demigod or spirit-crushing monopolist but as a man who has never known professional failure or rebuke, who has been subject to no authority other than the “invisible hand” of the market, and who simply doesn’t know how to react to the government’s directives; and, perhaps most interesting, there are essays on those the e-conomy has left behind: the published novelist who works at a soup kitchen because he is close enough to the edge to see the drop; the freelance writer who generated $75,000 in debt by living in contemporary New York, et al. Included as well are articles on cultural trends: In “A Sense of Change,” John Updike considers our romantic fascination with coins, and David Brooks, in “Conscientious Consumption,” discusses the new elite’s disdain for old styles of opulent wealth and the displays of riches they judge “acceptable.”
Thoughtful and thought-provoking, but, with only the most tenuous connections linking the various pieces, it seems little more than a clothbound special issue of the New Yorker.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50541-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
Aly delivers again, this time expanding his lens outside of Germany to offer further revelations about the Holocaust.
The award-winning German author dips into his vast archive of resources to produce a major work on anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism has been around for centuries. Though occasionally somewhat dormant, usually during times of fiscal strength and political peace, it always returns to rear its ugly head, each time spelling disaster for Jewish populations. Aly—the highly respected historian of the Holocaust who won the 2007 Jewish Book Award for his excellent Hitler's Beneficiaries—examines the period of 1880 to 1945 to show how, why, and in what forms anti-Semitism increased sufficiently to support the Nazi concept of the Final Solution. The author ranges widely across Europe, examining Russia, Romania, France, and Greece as well as Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, and other less-explored locales. “There is no way we can comprehend the pace and extent of the Holocaust,” writes Aly, “if we restrict our focus to the German centers of command.” While Jews were restricted from many jobs, they applied all their strength and determination to areas that were permitted, such as pharmacology, medicine, and journalism. Governmental actions began with bans on Jews serving municipalities and joining trade associations, and they also experienced limited access to education. After World War I, the concept of self-determination morphed into a brand of nationalism and misguided “racial theory” that led to increased animosity and violence. “Insofar as gentiles in the first half of the twentieth century pressed for Jews to be partially or completely stripped of their civil rights or insisted they be shipped off to somewhere outside Europe,” writes the author, “they were motivated by [an] obsessive anxiety: the fear of a supposedly overwhelming power and the real intellectual and economic agility of a small, precisely delineable ‘foreign’ group.” Though the gruesome subject and detail are sometimes tough to swallow, readers should forge ahead, relishing the author’s incredible research and singular scholarship.
Aly delivers again, this time expanding his lens outside of Germany to offer further revelations about the Holocaust.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-17017-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | HOLOCAUST | JEWISH | HISTORY
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The collected "pieces" of the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain form a compelling unit as he applies the high drama of poetry and sociology to a penetrating analysis of the Negro experience on the American and European scene.
He bares the brutal boners of "everybody's protest novel" from Stowe to Wright; points out that black is "devil-color" according to Christian theology and to "make white" is thus to save; reveals the positive base of Carmen Jones, movie version, as Negroes are white, that is, moral. Beyond such artistic attitudinal displays lie experimental realities: the Harlem Ghetto with its Negro press, the positive element of which tries to emulate the white press and provides an incongruous mixture of slick style and stark subject; the Ghetto with its churches and its hatred of the American reality behind the Jewish face (from which, as sufferers, so much was expected). There is a trip to Atlanta for the Wallace campaign and indignities endured; there is a beautiful essay, from which the book takes its title- of father and son and the corroding power of hate as it could grow from injustice. In Europe, there is the encounter of African and American Negro; a sojourn in jail over a stolen sheet; and last, the poignant essay of the first Negro to come to a remote Swiss village, to be greeted as a living wonder. This is not true in America, where he has a place, though equivocal, in our united life.
The expression of so many insights enriches rather than clarifies, and behind every page stalks a man, an everyman, seeking his identity...and ours. Exceptional writing.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1955
ISBN: 0807064319
Page Count: -
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1955
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PERSPECTIVES
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