A candid, unsparing look at the challenges Greece has yet to overcome.
Endemic problems plague a proud country.
Growing up on Long Island in the 1980s, freelance journalist Angelos often visited his grandmother, who lived in a humble, pastoral Greek village with a view of an Apollo temple. In 2011, returning on assignment for the Wall Street Journal, the author found a country in economic ruins, a place “both familiar to me but still foreign enough that I often found myself bewildered by it.” For his revealing and well-informed debut book, Angelos revisited Greece many times, interviewing politicians and ordinary citizens, government administrators and religious figures, émigrés and xenophobes, to investigate the causes and extent of the country’s financial and political crises. Many of those who spoke with him were angry, cynical, and despondent about the future. Repeatedly, the author discovered evidence of waste, graft, and political patronage. Years after two town treasurers were convicted of murdering a mayor, for example, they continued to receive their salaries, even while Greece’s official creditors pushed for bureaucratic reform. Bribes were a fact of daily life; tax evasion, “a national preoccupation. The pervasiveness of the habit, and the government’s enduring unwillingness to do anything about it, was more than any other single factor the cause of Greece’s financial troubles.” Many Greeks resented the European Union for imposing conditions in order to grant economic relief. Germany, especially, was hated by a population that recalled the brutal Nazi occupation. Germany, many felt, “was plundering Greece again, but this time without an army.” Like other European nations, Greece struggles with an influx of immigrants seeking refuge from poverty and persecution. Often the first country where these immigrants land, it resentfully sees itself as “Europe’s basement.” Many citizens believe in a self-serving narrative of “Hellenic purity and superiority” that has resulted in the rise of a fascist political party espousing anti-Semitism, anti-Turkish hatred, and strident anti-immigration rhetoric. Angelos follows these many threads with aplomb.
A candid, unsparing look at the challenges Greece has yet to overcome.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-34648-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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
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
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