An eye-opening study that makes its own case for stricter gun control.
A journey into the world of the heavily armed.
A few years ago, in Texas, a young Black man with mental illness banged agitatedly on a door and entered a house. He was shot repeatedly and killed by the homeowner. Shapira, a sociologist with expertise in militia and armed citizen groups, decided to study tactical shooting—and just happened to have this Texas shooter as an assistant instructor at the gun school. In this non-academic ethnography, “an exercise in understanding a uniquely American way of living,” he makes a number of close observations about the culture of firearms and firearms enthusiasts. One disturbing conclusion is that armed civilians are responsible for far more “legally sanctioned shootings” than are the police. A less surprising one is that the students Shapira encountered were almost all white men—though, against expectations, he adds that most have college degrees—who vote Republican. Against the commonly advanced canard that the government is coming to take gun rights away, the author charts a trajectory of continuous expansion, especially in his home state: “In fact, each subsequent legislative session seems to grant Texans the right to be armed somewhere new,” including churches and schoolrooms. The language of gun rights is all too often none too subtly racist, with “bad guys” typically pictured as wearing hoodies and baggy pants and haunting inner cities, and it is also built on a broadly shared sexist assumption that rape awaits the wives and girlfriends of the “good guys”: “To hunt a woman’s attacker down and kill him is the stuff of daydreams, if not legends.” All of this information is learned and not inborn, which leads Shapira to offer a chilling denouement about that shooter and his victim: “Michael had shot and killed Isaac not despite his years of training but because of them.”
An eye-opening study that makes its own case for stricter gun control.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780593317198
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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