An ambitious, empathetic work documenting community-building versus political intransigence and racial strife.
Arresting examination of how poverty-stricken cities are reinventing themselves.
Stanford Law School professor Anderson offers a corrective to bigoted narratives portraying cities as toxic boondoggles, showing how postindustrial decline blurred many complex factors. “Places of citywide poverty,” she writes, “help document the cause and consequences of widening inequality….This is a book about four places, for the sake of many others.” The author presents historically rooted examinations of Stockton, California; Detroit, Michigan; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Josephine County, Oregon. She focuses on community activists redefining grassroots efforts after decades of disinvestment. As Anderson demonstrates, during the Great Recession’s foreclosure crisis, stricken local governments navigated state programs for survival. “In the face of all these hardships,” she writes, “advocates in the four places profiled in this book found a way forward.” Each of the author’s detailed urban narratives is compelling. Stockton “has mostly lost its better-paid manufacturing jobs” following decades of redlining and segregation, and local officials slashed spending between 2008 and 2011. Violence spiked but has been countered by community activism and new policing approaches. In rural Josephine, a “rough and tumble” place with fortunes tied to the volatile timber industry, Anderson tracks “a grassroots movement in favor of new taxes in one of the most anti-government places in America.” In the former textile city of Lawrence, the author links forgotten labor activism to a traditional openness to immigrants, who now struggle with service-economy jobs: “Lawrence’s public and private leaders have done what immigrants are known for: form tight social networks and look out for the people in them.” Finally, Anderson looks at the better-known narrative of Detroit, focusing on the devastating decline of African American homeownership. The author’s discussion is complex, though the impact of her arguments is lessened by the repetitive aspects of these narratives of place. Nonetheless, it’s a welcome study of life in late-capitalist America.
An ambitious, empathetic work documenting community-building versus political intransigence and racial strife.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9598-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
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