Fund and von Spakovsky (Who's Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk, 2012) team up again for a no-holds-barred assault on Attorney General Eric Holder.
Both authors are well-known shapers of conservative opinion, and von Spakovsky, of George W. Bush’s Justice Department, so the authors include certain ongoing issues promoted by the right. These include, among others, the 2009-2011 “Operation Fast and Furious” gunwalking scandal, during which the Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were investigated for distributing weapons in Mexico subsequently used with deadly effect against American border enforcement agents. As a result, Holder became the first attorney general in history to be held in contempt of Congress, but Democrats voted overwhelmingly in support of Holder. What Fund and von Spakovsky have put together in this account seems to merit thoughtful consideration rather than peremptory dismissal as yet another partisan assault. For example, they ask why Holder's accounts of when he learned about the gunwalking scandal differed significantly in the versions he presented before the House and the Senate—and the differences have not been reconciled. The authors point to numerous Supreme Court decisions that question the legality and honesty of actions undertaken by Holder's department, and they discuss a number of criminal and civil prosecutions that have been dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct, including lying and withholding exculpatory evidence. Fund and von Spakovsky also question his practice of unilaterally changing interpretations of laws—e.g., the 1961 Interstate Wire Act. The authors detail the chilling effects of censorship and raise some intriguing issues about the conduct of the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
The book leans decidedly to the right, but Fund and von Spakovsky raise issues of partisan intrigue, dishonesty and criminality, with sufficient evidence to merit serious investigation and not just partisan dismissal.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232092-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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“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. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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