As fair and balanced as a solar-plexus punch can be.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist summarizes and analyzes the reasons the press, prior to the 2008 mortgage crisis, failed to pursue some obvious villains.
Starkman—an editor at the Columbia Journalism Review and a veteran newspaperman (Wall Street Journal, among others)—has both historical and analytical items on his agenda. He begins with Ida Tarbell, who wrote massive investigative pieces about Standard Oil for McClure’s at the turn of the 20th century, then sketches the history of the muckraking tradition, which has ebbed and flowed over the past century. He also offers some history of financial journalism, including the history of the WSJ, Barron’s, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes and others. Among the sundry heroes who emerge is Michael Hudson, a journalist who has focused on poverty issues since the early 1990s and whose name, efforts and accomplishments appear continually throughout the final two-thirds of Starkman’s text. Throughout, as well, the author returns to the distinction between “access” and “accountability” reporting—between stories that basically profile business leaders and present their views and investigative stories designed to bring into the light information that some (many? most?) in the business community would prefer to keep hidden. These two approaches, he shows, have waxed and waned over the years; unfortunately, they were on the wane in the years leading up to 2008. Starkman is careful, though, to credit individuals and publications that did see the looming problem, but, he writes, these stories were neither prominent nor pervasive enough to have a salutary effect. He notes the numerous causes of the problem—the rise of the Internet (and decline of newspapers), the barriers facing investigative journalists and the complexity of economic issues—though he can be obscure when he tries to explain derivatives and mortgage-backed securities.
As fair and balanced as a solar-plexus punch can be.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-231-15818-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
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