Authoritative, illuminating and accessible.
This provocative study of minority-vote suppression successfully links blatant Reconstruction-era tactics and regulations with modern-day voting in America.
Activist Piven (Political Science and Sociology/CUNY; Challenging Authority, 2006, etc.), along with co-authors Minnite (Political Science/Barnard Coll.) and Groarke (Government/Manhattan Coll.), argues that decentralized electoral rules and regulations were originally designed to limit the African-American vote in the South, in response to the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which enfranchised all freed black men. Tactics employed in the 19th century included literacy tests, poll taxes, violence and intimidation; the ultimate discretion to disqualify voters was ceded to registrars. The authors note that the American personal-registration system puts the burden of registration on the voter rather than on the government, unlike many European democracies. The U.S. electoral system further allows certification to be periodic, permitting local election officials to sporadically purge voters. The book kicks into high gear when the authors describe, in riveting detail, the fevered techniques employed to suppress the black vote in important 1960s mayoral elections in Gary, Chicago and Cleveland, where the African-American electorate had surged due to migration. Qualified black voters were purged from registration rolls, ghost voters were added in white precincts and a campaign of disinformation prevailed, impeding new registrations of poor minorities. All three African-American candidates won anyway, but another goal was to mobilize the white vote by playing to racist fears using ugly stereotypes. The authors posit that these fears stem from demographic realities as America’s composition becomes more diverse, and that the Republican Party has become the champion for delaying the inevitable devolution of white power by focusing on close elections. The most compelling section is the informed analysis of how aggressive tactics, such as targeted misinformation campaigns and the challenging of black voters at polling places, were used to secure a Republican victory “by 537 votes” in the Florida 2000 election, where “nearly 180,000 ballots were cast but not counted…more than half of these by blacks, who make up only 12 percent of the state’s population.”
Authoritative, illuminating and accessible.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59558-354-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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