Next book

HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE WORLD

AN UNLIKELY THEORY OF GLOBALIZATION

Though the globalism thread sometimes disappears, the author is unfailingly interesting. Lively and provocative—even for...

A novel look at how the world is everywhere becoming more alike, and everywhere more different, as people seek to define themselves through football.

“I suck at soccer,” young New Republic staffer Foer offers by way of an opening. And why not? He’s an American, and Americans see soccer—what the rest of the world calls “football”—differently. Where in Italy or Brazil or Kenya, say, it’s a working-class sport laden with working-class aspirations, in the US it’s inverted: “Here, aside from Latino immigrants, the professional classes follow the game most avidly and the working class couldn’t give a toss about it.” Yet everywhere the game is politicized as none other: In the US, “soccer moms” are alternately reviled and courted while reactionary politicos insist that soccer is fundamentally un-American (and probably socialist, too, as Jack Kemp once urged). In Scotland, Foer writes, the game affords a screen behind which to play out fantastic anti-Catholic hatreds. (Glasgow, Foer brightly adds, provides a fine rebuttal to the capitalist theory that “once a society becomes economically advanced, it becomes politically advanced—liberal, tolerant, democratic.”) In the heart of the former Yugoslavia, where the soccer hooligans are so tough that they regularly beat up their own teams, professional football has provided shibboleths by which to separate and massacre Croats, Bosnians, Slovenians, and other non-Serbian types. In Spain, football arenas still resound with echoes of the civil war of the 1930s. In the Middle East, the game provides a means of expressing anti-fundamentalist sentiment. And so on. One day soccer/football will be played everywhere, Foer hints, and fans in Benin and Burlington will cheer players in Belgrade and Botswana; but in each place, even as the sport remakes the planet, those big and little cultural differences will remain, perhaps some day to provoke future wars, revolutions, or renaissances.

Though the globalism thread sometimes disappears, the author is unfailingly interesting. Lively and provocative—even for those who just don’t get what FIFA is all about.

Pub Date: July 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-06-621234-0

Page Count: 272

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004

Next book

GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

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

Next book

HOW TO FIGHT ANTI-SEMITISM

A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.

Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.

While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.

A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019

Close Quickview