A collection of dark and clever essays from Buzz magazine's Johnson (Physical Culture, 1989) pumps up L.A. eccentricities with metaphors of the profound. The exotic particularities of life in L.A., often parodied, incorporated in movies, television shows, and sex-and-shopping fiction, are for Johnson the stuff of philosophy and metaphor. As she browses Rodeo Drive she notes that ``it's so easy to scoff at the whorish gilt and gewgaws . . . but I believe it's a seat of consciousness for the same reason that it's awful.'' She muses, as she looks for shoes at Gucci, that ``if Chanel is Bu§uel, Gucci is J.G. Ballard: as fresh as an eroticized car crash in an alternate but highly moral universe.'' Tori Spelling, she suggests, is, in her own way, an icon with as much current resonance as, say, Our Lady of Guadalupe. As part of her attempt to plumb the reality of life in L.A., Johnson touches on some truly outrÇ stuff, including a visit to a Malibu ranch used for shooting porn. And along with each adventure, she includes a meaningful description of her wardrobe and other life artifacts. At the ChÉteau Marmont to interview Esther Williams, she wears ``a fifties cerise cocktail dress with a floaty chiffon train.'' On her first day in L.A., feeling the need for some symbolic statement, she stops at a garage in the suburbs to change into a special flowered dress. The title refers back to Buckminster Fuller's concept of the dymaxion, a self-contained world in which everything that one needs for life is present in a kind of interdependent unity. For Johnson, Los Angeles has been her dymaxion, the place where she learned, she says, not so much to be happy as to be authentic. Johnson is a universe shaper, with a powerful mind careening slightly to self-parody, and a lot of attitude.
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15668-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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BOOK REVIEW
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
Categories: FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
“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. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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