A spirited, thoughtful anthology.
A collection of essays that skewers California state government for confiscatory taxation and ideological partisanship.
In his second book, Lacy (Taxifornia: Liberals’ Laboratory to Bankrupt America, 2014) carefully curates a series of pieces that focus on the destructive consequences of California’s tax system. The book as a whole largely anatomizes the issue from three broad perspectives. First, the state’s approach to taxation, it says, is starving business by creating punitive obstacles to commercial activity. It also asserts that the increasing aggrandizement of the state’s bureaucracy has generated massive inefficiencies in the ways that basic public services are delivered. Finally, the underlying impetus for such aggressive taxation, it says, is the satisfaction of liberal ideological commitments rather than any clearly definable, nonpartisan good. In his essay “Why Stay?” Liftable Media chairman Floyd Brown argues that the primary purpose of California’s obsession with tax collection is to reward public unions for their continued electoral loyalty, creating a form of collusion at the expense of the taxpaying public. Journalist Katy Grimes contends that prodigal spending on “ineffectual antipoverty programs, police sensitivity training, and community-based youth and outreach services” has failed to reign in Oakland’s spiraling problem with crime and that the state at large is following suit. Orange County Water District director Shawn Dewane examines California’s well-publicized struggle with its water supply, contending that the state’s shortage is more a function of its deference to partisan environmental policies than a scarcity of natural resources: “Half of the state’s water supply is reserved for environmental purposes—and environmentalists get first priority. In times of drought, everyone else takes a cut first.” City Journal editor and Sacramento Bee columnist Ben Boychuk attempts to draw a causal line from the state’s taxation to its burgeoning inequality, saying that California essentially creates a prospering class of civil servants at the fiscal expense of others. These essays by respected experts are rigorously presented and provocatively argued. Lacy is upfront that the book comes from a conservative and libertarian viewpoint, so readers looking for an essay or two defending a liberal perspective will be disappointed. However, this collection effectively challenges the conventional wisdom about the causes of California’s economic distress.
A spirited, thoughtful anthology.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-45018-5
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Landslide Communications, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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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