A hopeful and provocative analysis bound to raise discussion.
A lively dismantling of preconceptions about the rural U.S.
Currid-Halkett, a professor of public policy and author of The Sum of Small Things and The Warhol Economy, makes a convincing case that the sharp divide we have come to imagine exists between urban and rural America is more a result of lazy or prejudiced journalism than reality. Using an intriguing combination of statistical analysis and extensive telephone interviews with a range of residents, she argues that “the depiction of rural America as a cultural backwater, rife with pathologies and problems,” doesn't reflect the lived experience of the 20% of Americans who live in areas defined as rural. In fact, residents of these areas have lives as “varied and diverse” as those in cities. In particular, the author found very little evidence of anger directed by residents of rural areas toward city dwellers. Examining “the ongoing narrative of the poor, angry Trump voter” and taking a deep dive into the data, she found “not that Trump voters are angry, poor, and left behind, but rather that they are in regions with high home ownership and low unemployment” and that “most people voted for him not because they felt left out of the economic system or desired a deeper reckoning, but rather because they wanted to.” (Many readers may wonder why they wanted to.) The author suggests that when urban Americans think about rural America, they tend to think about Appalachia and, in particular, West Virginia, areas that have been ravaged by opioid abuse but whose experiences do not reflect small-town life as a whole. Currid-Halkett, who grew up in rural Pennsylvania and now lives in Los Angeles, found the process of getting to know her interviewees, often over a long period of time, a positive experience. “To sit on the phone for an hour or so with each of these people,” she writes, “was one of the most heartening experiences of my life.”
A hopeful and provocative analysis bound to raise discussion.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781541646728
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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