Affording glimpses into both scientific detection processes and vicious academic infighting, this will appeal to scientists...
Engrossing account of recent developments in a long-running and contentious scientific debate.
With the exception of the creationism vs. evolution controversy, few areas of contemporary science have engendered such fierce dogmatism and even fiercer adherents as the questions of who the first Americans were and when they got here. Assisted by science writer and editor Page (The Lethal Partner, 1996, etc.), Adovasio presents his case with reasonableness and clarity. He begins with his early fieldwork at the Meadowcroft Rockshelter near Pittsburgh, where in 1974 he found charcoal from two hearths that placed humans in the vicinity nearly 4,000 years before they supposedly have set foot anywhere on the continent. Though he vowed not to, the author became ensnared in what anthropologist Tom D. Dillehay has called the “dishonesty, double standards, and phony scientific posture” of scholars with an axe to grind or a reputation to uphold at all costs. At issue was the sacrosanct notion that nomadic mammoth hunters crossed the frozen Bering Strait during the last glacial period about 12,000 years ago. Now director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute, Adovasio contends humans arrived millennia earlier, most likely by boat, and that the contributions of women were more critical to their success than previously credited. Despite the existence of such widely accepted methods as radiocarbon dating, much evidence about the time of human habitation in the Americas has been automatically discounted by opponents of whatever theory the dating supports. Add to this the fact that various ethnic groups, including modern Native Americans, have a vested interest in the first Americans being their ancestors, whether a lost band of Israelites or survivors of a sunken Atlantis or wandering Welshmen in sealskin coracles, and you have all the ingredients for an intellectual brouhaha that frequently reached the vitriolic flashpoint.
Affording glimpses into both scientific detection processes and vicious academic infighting, this will appeal to scientists and general readers alike.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50552-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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