An impressively sober and fair-minded analysis.
A comprehensive center-left political platform that addresses the worsening problem of economic inequality.
Inequality is perennially a hot topic, but debates about it reached a fever pitch during the recent election season. Debut author and economist Anthony argues that inequality could potentially lead to electoral gains for a center-left political coalition, but a steady loss of constituent support has resulted instead. In this book, the author articulates a remarkably comprehensive program that includes a series of economic remedies and a campaign strategy. He begins with a brief synopsis of modern economic theory, featuring paragraph-length summaries of the work of such economic thinkers as Adam Smith and Milton Friedman. Then he explains the sources of inequality, noting that the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher revolution ushered in lowered tax rates, diminished welfare spending, resulted in wide-scale deregulation and privatization, and unleashed the forces of globalization. His recommendations are ambitiously thorough, covering everything from fiscal policy to food distribution. Problematically, this comprehensiveness results in a lack of rigorously considered detail; as the title suggests, this is a manifesto, not an academic white paper. Anthony could have cut a section that breezily covers philosophical arguments against inequality, which is both gratuitous and too intellectually slight to convince detractors. Also, the book acknowledges but insufficiently discusses some central economic problems; for instance, Anthony concedes that the concept of a living wage is vague, but he also recommends its institution without providing much guidance on the proper amount. Finally, some proposals are too controversial for just a few sentences of clarification; for example, the author suggests that media proprietors could be “directly targeted” and essentially threatened for more favorable coverage, and the efficacy, as well as the legitimacy, of such an aggressive approach is far from obvious. Still, this is an admirably nonpartisan account of the problem of inequality, especially given that its entire economic program is couched in a political platform. It should be edifying not only for readers who share Anthony’s politics, but also for those who are reflexively opposed to them.
An impressively sober and fair-minded analysis.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2016
ISBN: 9781483455099
Page Count: 249
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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