A thoughtful call for equality of economic opportunity, both provocative and, in the end, eminently practical.
An exposé of the many barriers marginalized people face in gaining access to the so-called American dream.
“We claim that we live in a land of opportunity, when in fact we have systematically denied opportunity for centuries,” writes Fuhrer, a foundation fellow at the Eastern Bank Foundation. The myth of the title is less a single yarn than the tangled mass of threads that comprise systemic racism in economic life—though if it were to be reduced to a single falsehood, it’s that each of us has the same opportunities to work and grow rich. It should be no surprise that the playing field is anything but level and that “the array of policies that were designed to build wealth for white families” is largely unavailable to anyone else. For individuals, the inequalities begin in childhood, with a huge differential in the accessibility of pediatric health care and educational and social support systems for early childhood development to minority and white populations. One of many hurdles, writes Fuhrer, is that the years of early childhood care tend to be the years of lowest earning, which means that the ability to borrow funds is constricted and the need for assistance greatest. A free-marketer fundamentalist may be shocked by Fuhrer’s program of remedies. Apart from increasing access to day care programs, for example, he recommends installing “school-to-work educational programs” that would serve as pipelines by which individuals with the necessary skills are steered from community college or trade school to jobs, with the costs borne by taxpayers and industry alike. He also recommends raising the minimum wage and, to make that possible, giving large tax breaks to the small businesses that might otherwise be harmed by the cost burden. Following Fuhrer’s tally sheet will surely make a libertarian blanch, but it’s an interesting back-of-the-envelope exercise in balancing costs and return on investment.
A thoughtful call for equality of economic opportunity, both provocative and, in the end, eminently practical.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9780262048392
Page Count: 384
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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