A grim filigree of turmoil during peacetime.
Hill, who taught in Eritrea for two years, beginning in 1996, digs deeply, humanely, and with political keenness into the country’s history.
In 1993, after more than thirty years of fighting against their Ethiopian occupiers, 99.81 percent of Eritrean voters cast their ballots in favor of independence. It doesn’t take much of a stretch to imagine why, writes the author: the Ethiopians had been brutally destructive. Hill provides a crisp, colorful history of this strip along the Red Sea, from the ancient kingdom of Axum through the period of Italian colonial rule to the quashing of Eritrea’s post-WWII dreams of independence due to the duplicity of the US government, determined to reward Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie for his anti-communism. The author then chronicles the long-odds struggle of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) against Selassie’s troops and those of the foul junta that overthrew him. As most of Hill’s acquaintances were EPLF fighters, readers get a good inside look at their political vision, a kind of Maoism scrubbed of Mao that advocated land reform, education, health care, and gender equality. Here, Hill (the novel The Drink and Dream Teahouse, 2001, etc.) shows, things get tricky: the Eritrean government, now under EPLF control, was still dedicated to social revolution, but the EPLF at its height had 60,000 members, and the nation’s three-million civilians would not so quickly adopt their policies. In a country that had essentially been reduced to rubble, full of war-ravaged people without jobs, any prospects for a rapid swing into democracy were slim. The new government played favorites, and the acting president seemed not at all eager to call elections. The revolution was crumbling, dreams were turning sour. All this emerges in Hill’s descriptions of his trips about the country with Eritrean friends, painted with the exquisiteness of Persian miniatures. Then it was back to fighting and goodbye to well-meaning foreigners. At embarkation, Hill writes bitterly, “Eritrea was returning to war and we were leaving them to it.”
A grim filigree of turmoil during peacetime.Pub Date: March 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-349-11774-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abacus/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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