An illuminating journey through United States history told via historical writings and speeches.
Lee has chosen 30 pieces by mostly famous Americans (and one Brit) that shine spotlights on the American character. These writings ably reflect major developments in America, arranged chronologically from John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” sermon in 1630 to President George W. Bush’s “Justice Will Be Done” speech following the events of 9/11. Lee, who has taught at five major universities, writes that education was his primary goal in creating this book: “Thomas Jefferson famously remarked that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.…I would prefer to think that education might suffice to refresh the tree of liberty.” Later, he spells out his qualifications for editing such a volume: “First, I am an American. Second, I am a parent. These two qualifications together impel me to do whatever I can to educate first my children and then anyone else about our country’s greatness.” In an effort to appeal to today’s youth, Lee wisely selects shorter works, with all 30 pieces fitting into roughly 150 pages. The compendium’s crowning achievement is how it provides context for such well-known phrases as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream.” Overall, the beauty of this collection is in how it offers historical anecdotes directly from the pens and mouths of great American leaders, and Lee’s selections lead to some clever juxtapositions. President Calvin Coolidge’s 1925 speech extolling American business, for example, is followed by FDR’s first inaugural address in 1933, blasting the business practices that led to the Great Depression. There are also rallying cries by two very different World War II generals: the profane George S. Patton and the straight-laced Dwight D. Eisenhower.
A revealing volume of spoken and written history aimed at a general readership.
Pub Date: May 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499680393
Page Count: 138
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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