With solid research and engaging humor, this book takes apart the conspiracy theories surrounding the Rothschild family.
Trekking through the maze of accusations surrounding the Rothschild dynasty.
Journalist Rothschild, a conspiracy theory expert and author of The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, is not related to the famous Rothschild family, but he readily admits that the name is one of the most recognizable in the world. Synonymous with untold riches, luxurious indulgence, and shadowy power, the Rothschild family has been accused of almost everything, from manipulating wars for profit to controlling the weather and even starting the California wildfires with an orbiting solar generator (hence the book's title). Much of the ire is rooted in antisemitic tropes, and the author carefully unpacks the connections. The dynasty began in the mid-16th century, when Isak Rothschild scrambled out of the Frankfurt ghetto and established himself as a banker. The myth really took off when the family became financier to various European governments, cementing the idea of commercial acumen turning into political influence. The conspiracy theories evolved, with proponents endlessly quoting each other and connecting bits of “evidence” to concoct lurid tableaux of power wielded in secret. The notion that the family “owns” the U.S. Federal Reserve is particularly outlandish, illustrating how contrary evidence can be folded into the conspiracy. “Whenever Western pop culture needs a wealthy and secretive family to be running some kind of hidden puppet-master routine,” writes the author, “the Rothschilds are available.” A new generation of Rothschild conspiracy theories has taken hold in Asia and the Muslim world, and they have even found a niche in hip-hop. The Rothschilds, for their part, largely maintain a dignified silence. The author does a solid job of separating fact from fantasy, creating an interesting examination of how conspiracy theories appear, spread, and metastasize—not unlike tumors.
With solid research and engaging humor, this book takes apart the conspiracy theories surrounding the Rothschild family.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781685890643
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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