A timely case study from a war of ideas being waged, ever more intensely, across the nation.
A Peabody Award–winning journalist delivers a frontline account of the right-wing campaign to control public school curricula.
Southlake, a well-to-do Dallas suburb, was an unlikely battleground over public education. “The town’s economic boom ensured the district was flush with resources,” writes NBC senior investigative reporter Hixenbaugh, and that meant plenty of funding for advanced courses that dealt with important matters such as the idea that the Civil War had something to do with slavery. Like the rest of white America, Southlake divided sharply when Barack Obama became the first Black president, and once Trump came into office, a slice of the student body and their parents began to vent racist ideology with gleeful abandon. Arrayed against this group were progressive parents and students who pressed for the Southlake school board to take such actions as declare support for Black Lives Matter and “impose a ban on racist imagery, including the Confederate flag, from all district facilities.” With that, a new civil war brewed, with an inevitable result. “The local fight in Southlake,” writes the author, “had caught the attention of powerful forces in the far-right wing of the Texas GOP—and they’d seen an opportunity.” That opportunity included pouring money into a campaign to turn the school board and district into instruments of the approved right-wing curriculum: no hint of discussion of injustices done to marginalized communities, no hint that America was anything other than a Christian nation, no hint of so-called woke ideas. Hixenbaugh’s account of the battle is detailed and sharp-edged, even if the results are as expected: dedicated teachers forced out of their jobs due to the altered curricula, progressive high school graduates vowing to continue the fight, and smugly satisfied Trumpists in power.
A timely case study from a war of ideas being waged, ever more intensely, across the nation.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780063307247
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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
Maher calls out idiocy wherever he sees it, with a comedic delivery that veers between a stiletto and a sledgehammer.
The comedian argues that the arts of moderation and common sense must be reinvigorated.
Some people are born snarky, some become snarky, and some have snarkiness thrust upon them. Judging from this book, Maher—host of HBO’s Real Time program and author of The New New Rules and When You Ride Alone, You Ride With bin Laden—is all three. As a comedian, he has a great deal of leeway to make fun of people in politics, and he often delivers hilarious swipes with a deadpan face. The author describes himself as a traditional liberal, with a disdain for Republicans (especially the MAGA variety) and a belief in free speech and personal freedom. He claims that he has stayed much the same for more than 20 years, while the left, he argues, has marched toward intolerance. He sees an addiction to extremism on both sides of the aisle, which fosters the belief that anyone who disagrees with you must be an enemy to be destroyed. However, Maher has always displayed his own streaks of extremism, and his scorched-earth takedowns eventually become problematic. The author has something nasty to say about everyone, it seems, and the sarcastic tone starts after more than 300 pages. As has been the case throughout his career, Maher is best taken in small doses. The book is worth reading for the author’s often spot-on skewering of inept politicians and celebrities, but it might be advisable to occasionally dip into it rather than read the whole thing in one sitting. Some parts of the text are hilarious, but others are merely insulting. Maher is undeniably talented, but some restraint would have produced a better book.
Maher calls out idiocy wherever he sees it, with a comedic delivery that veers between a stiletto and a sledgehammer.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781668051351
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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