An entertaining exploration of personal desires and needs, with larger social and economic implications.
Perceptive, often funny month-by-month diary of life as a nonconsumer by journalist and memoirist Levine (Do You Remember Me?, 2004, etc.).
Strong disagreement with the administration’s post-9/11 linkage of spending with patriotism; a deep-seated ambivalence about consuming; and malaise brought on by Christmas shopping prompted Levine and live-in partner Paul to take a vow to purchase only necessities for a full year, starting on New Year’s Day 2004. Just what is a necessity took some working out, but essentially, they agreed to spend money only on the basic business expenses of their home-based jobs and on what was needed to keep themselves and their pets fed, sheltered and in good health. Every year, they spend the winter and summer months at Paul’s house in rural northern Vermont and the spring and fall at Levine’s apartment in Brooklyn. The experiment began in the Vermont town of Hardwick, a place with relatively few commercial temptations. Whether in Vermont or Brooklyn, however, their connections with friends and family forced decisions: how to ask for and accept help, how to entertain, how to give gifts, how to maintain relationships without meeting for lunch or going to a movie. Discoveries about themselves and what’s important abound. Levine is a keen observer of her own emotions as well as an experienced reporter, providing vivid accounts of attending meetings of a Voluntary Simplicity group, watching a Buy Nothing Day demonstration and visiting the home of an extreme practitioner of simple living. When she admits to breaking the rules in June, buying a shirt and pants at a thrift shop because she had “nothing to wear,” and then in August succumbing to a luscious pair of pants that made her “look thin,” most women will understand and will sympathize with her growing weariness with Paul’s “effortless purity.” By November, Levine reports, she was not only free of the desire to shop but free of the desire to judge those who do.
An entertaining exploration of personal desires and needs, with larger social and economic implications.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-6935-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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