Essential black study by a young white sociologist/law student. Feelings abound under the clear surface of Duneier's debut book as he weighs his four years of research on a group of poor, working-class blacks in the Valois ``See Your Food'' Cafeteria on Chicago's South Side—with some whites included. Duneier explodes stereotypes and shows these ghetto men as ``respectable'' while not conforming to middle-class black (or white) stereotypes. Slim, a car mechanic is more or less the respected bachelor master of the table where the diners meet once or twice a day for anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes a meal. We watch Slim as he substitutes an elderly white diner, Bart, as his father figure and cares for him, although Bart still has a southerner's belief in racial superiority and is a tight-lipped recluse. Bart tells a southern visitor that Slim is his friend, but when Bart is hospitalized he cannot bring himself to thank Slim for some candy—he'd rather refuse the gift. The diners form a moral community that transcends roles and images. Duneier is good at building a sense of their masculinity as they disclose personal weaknesses and fail to dominate women or even to coexist with them. Ozzie, a regular, tells of having to give up dating a woman who is too well known on the street, has five children by five different men, likes reefers and coke, and seems a sitting duck for AIDS. The author shoots down many otherwise sensitive landmark black studies of the past half-century for generalizing about working-class blacks, often from essentially middle-class studies and unsatisfactory evidence, thus confirming inaccurate black stereotypes. The media get bashed as well. Fresh fieldwork on innocence and racial stereotyping in the ghetto. Rewires your thinking. (Four halftones by Pulitzer-winning Chicago Tribune photographer Ovie Carter.)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-226-17030-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1992
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
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