An articulate and conscientious critique of free trade that should be read by anyone with serious interest in the subject.
An economist and adjunct fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council argues that continuing a program of unregulated free trade is bad for America and proposes a solution that will benefit the U.S. economy in the long term.
Employing a typical economist’s rationality in this methodical and nonpartisan book, Fletcher takes to task the commonly held assumption that free trade is an inherently and inarguably good system for America, as well as the notion that challenges to this assumption are reactionary and mercantilist. Citing massive trade deficits—the fact that America imports much more than it exports—he argues that American primacy is waning as the dollar becomes less valuable. Fletcher undertakes a systematic approach to debunking free trade, beginning with clear-eyed explanations of free trade as it currently stands and the negative consequences it increasingly has on America. He devotes much of the book to his opposition’s arguments, deconstructing them so as to give free-trade detractors cogent rebuttals on the subject (a particularly favored whipping boy is the idea of comparative advantage). However, he saves the real intellectual wrath for the economists who either actively or tacitly support free trade. While politicians and powerful corporations do hold some sway, it will always be theories that dictate trade policy. Fletcher is of the opinion that any theory that supports free trade is the result of unrealistic assumptions about how trade works in today’s world as well as antiquated ideas about perfectly sound economies. His reasoned answer as to how trade should operate in America comprises the book’s third section. In short, he favors what is called a natural strategic tariff, one that is simple in implementation (he offers a 30 percent rate) but complex in effect, as different industries would be inherently more sensitive to a tariff. Such a system would promote some manufacturing to move back to America (indeed, the industries that would be affected are the very ones Americans want back on their shores) while leaving untouched other goods that the country would still happily import.
An articulate and conscientious critique of free trade that should be read by anyone with serious interest in the subject.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0578053325
Page Count: 346
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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