An affecting portrait of post-apartheid South Africa, particularly useful for writing instructors serving at-risk...
Journalist Burge recounts a sojourn in a township outside Cape Town working with a writing group called Amazw’Entombi, or “Voices of the Girls.”
The “Born Frees” of the title are the first generation of black South Africans born after 1994, when the apartheid regime of old had fallen and Nelson Mandela had been elected the nation’s first black president. These young people, she writes, “were inheriting a country awash in contradictions.” Its constitution was among the most progressive in the world, prohibiting discrimination on every axis and mandating gender equality. Yet, Burge notes, the abuse of women is endemic: “More than a third of girls have experienced sexual violence before the age of eighteen,” she writes, while young women are particularly at risk of contracting HIV. The writing club she founded was not a development project as such, Burge writes, but was a means of providing community, empowerment, and a voice. As one of the participants puts it, “To me, writing is me. / It is me listening / to what I have to say...to what my heart says.” Nonetheless, it touched on other development projects in its parent church, including close work with HIV/AIDS and food distribution services. Some girls who lived in overcrowded nuclear or foster households went hungry, since food went to children by blood first. This was a manifestation of a phenomenon called “partial parenting,” in which households are generally fatherless and with mothers absent because of work, so that children are raised by grandmothers, aunts, or friends—the result being a generation of children hungry for attention and thus bursting with the need to express themselves. But not, Burge sagely notes, the need to be rescued: “I didn’t go into Gugulethu to rescue these girls. They did not need me, or anyone, to save them.”
An affecting portrait of post-apartheid South Africa, particularly useful for writing instructors serving at-risk constituencies.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-23916-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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