by Mitchell Duneier ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 19, 2016
Americans did not create the ghetto, but in this well-documented study, we see clearly how those urban areas have come to...
How communities—especially in the United States—created, ostracized, and condemned the idea and reality of the ghetto.
For more than 500 years, urban societies have found ways to coerce, compel, and otherwise force perceived undesirable groups into their own isolated and sometimes literally enclosed areas of cities. These areas, known as “ghettoes,” most often served to separate Jews from the rest of the population. Yet today, when Americans hear the word “ghetto,” they are most likely to associate it with the African-American “inner city.” In this fine book, Duneier (Sociology/Princeton Univ.; Sidewalk, 1999, etc.), a sociologist who has a knack for writing for general audiences, examines the history of the spaces that came to be called ghettos as well as the concept of them. In the first chapter, the author clearly shows the long history of the ghettos that emerged in Europe to isolate Jews, and he emphasizes the way the Nazis brought the stigmatization of Jews to its most extreme manifestation. He then follows with a series of chapters that alternate between Chicago and New York’s Harlem and the individuals who confronted the emergent ghettos in those cities. Duneier effectively merges scholarship with a journalist’s eye for detail and compellingly reveals the myriad ways in which the ghetto has come to embody the fears and failures of the societies where they have manifested. However, given that he notes how it is ahistorical to associate the idea of the ghetto primarily with black Americans since American ghettos make up only about 10 percent of the 500-year history of their existence, it is curious that roughly 90 percent of his book is devoted to precisely that anachronism. An expansion of the themes of his first chapter would have strengthened the book. Nonetheless, this is accessible historical sociology that deserves a wide readership.
Americans did not create the ghetto, but in this well-documented study, we see clearly how those urban areas have come to embody so many of our shortcomings when it comes to matters of race.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-16180-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
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
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