Dense but lucid, insightful, and unsettling global survey.
An astute analysis of the purported breakdown of the once-liberal international order.
Thompson, a professor of political economy at Cambridge, begins with a geopolitical history focused on energy. As the 20th century began, oil was replacing coal as the driving force of military power. Though the U.S. had plenty of oil, the Western European great powers did not. During World War I, Britain and France made efforts to control the fading Ottoman Empire, but they required oil and money from the U.S. and ended the war in significant debt. American oil and money were pivotal to the outcome of World War II, but by the 1970s, the U.S. joined Europe in their dependence on oil from the Middle East. By 1974, the Soviet Union was the world’s leading oil producer. In recent decades, the development of fracking restored America’s global leadership, just in time for China, entirely dependent on imported gas and oil, to become the nation’s main rival. Already dominating in renewable energy manufacturing, China is poised to lead the energy wave of the future. Turning to economic history, Thompson writes that the end of the dollar-based Bretton Woods monetary order in the 1970s eliminated fixed exchange rates, soon to be followed by the end of government controls by the “neoliberalism” of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. This produced a vast increase in debt, further problems with the world’s oil supply, multiple economic crashes in 2007 and 2008, and sharper geopolitical conflict. The author concludes with a sharp and disturbing evaluation of both American and European democracies. Although long proclaimed to be superior to other political systems, they have been historically reliant on the destabilizing idea of nationalism and vulnerable to economic crises. The years since 1970 have seen Americans obsessed with numerous misplaced notions about immigrants, susceptible to plutocratic tendencies that favor the wealthy, and “increasingly unresponsive to democratic demands for economic reforms that would increase the return to labor.”
Dense but lucid, insightful, and unsettling global survey.Pub Date: March 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-19-886498-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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