A carefully researched and argued study of democracy as an evolving, and anciently rooted, means of political organization.
The claims of exceptionalists to the contrary, democracy is not a Western invention—nor its definitive form of government.
The received wisdom, writes Stasavage, a professor of politics at NYU, is that the Greeks bequeathed both the word and the institution of democracy before it faded away, to be reborn more than a millennium after with the Magna Carta and the republics of medieval Italy. “One problem with this story,” he writes, “is that when Europeans began conquering peoples on other continents, they sometimes found that local people had political institutions that were more democratic than what they knew in their home countries.” The French missionaries who explored what is now Canada, for example, discovered that women had political rights in a system with a broad distribution of power. In much of Europe at the same time, writes the author, democracy flourished largely in places where local rulers were too weak to control the state—one gauge being the rulers’ knowledge of local economies and their subsequent failure to collect tax revenue based on good information. Autocratic governments, by contrast, tended to know about such things as gross domestic product, collecting significantly more revenue in the bargain. Along the way, Stasavage looks into such matters as whether a society marked by inequality is more inclined to autocracy than democracy, since “have-nots may…be more susceptible to the appeals of demagogues.” It’s a point well worth pondering. In the end, notes the author, democracy isn’t inevitable, but it is and has been so widespread among societies around the world that it appears to “come naturally to humans.” Modern democracy has evolved in complex ways, he adds, with the system of checks and balances being an example of a departure from the powers of the Athenians, eventually allowing the disenfranchised “a powerful argument for demanding the same rights as others.”
A carefully researched and argued study of democracy as an evolving, and anciently rooted, means of political organization.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-691-17746-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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