Nevertheless, this is a captivating portrait of the struggle between labor and capital during a formative period in the...
One of the most influential Americans you never heard of rides the crest of a labor uprising in Gilded Age New York City.
Between 1877 and 1879, Henry George (1839-1897), a self-educated printer, wrote a lengthy book entitled Progress and Poverty, which became the bestselling book on political economy in the 19th century. George grappled with the question of why the century's explosion of productivity was not bringing widespread prosperity but instead a growing gap between rich and poor. The specifics of his theories are less important than his challenge to the prevailing social Darwinist orthodoxy that poverty was the fault of the poor, rights of ownership and contract were sacrosanct, and government should leave business to its own devices. George's contention that poverty was in large measure the result of misguided public policy and that government should regulate business in defense of traditional American values paved the way for the progressive movement of the next century. It also helped inspire a wave of labor union activism that saw George run for mayor of New York City in 1886 atop a workers’ party. He bested a young Theodore Roosevelt but lost to the Tammany candidate. O'Donnell (History/Holy Cross; 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About Irish American History, 2006, etc.) ably illuminates the rise and collapse of local labor unions in the 1870s and ’80s, fueled by the empowering arguments of George and a number of contemporaries. However, George focused intently on land monopoly, and O'Donnell never fully clarifies how his reforms were intended to work or why, apart from George's fiery pro-union rhetoric, urban workers found his program compelling. While one might expect the period's "crisis of inequality" to resonate with similar current concerns, the circumstances of the eras are so different that the author does not attempt to draw explicit links between the two.
Nevertheless, this is a captivating portrait of the struggle between labor and capital during a formative period in the quest for workers' rights.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-231-12000-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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