Full of lessons for American activists on how to bring enhanced social welfare programs into reality, despite the odds.
A tour of progressive countries and their solutions to problems of social issues such as education and health care.
An American resident in Europe, Hakimi Zapata tours the world to analyze the ways in which developed nations have enacted programs leading to progress in meeting social needs. “I became convinced that as we fight for a more equitable and sustainable existence,” she writes, “progressives need to arm themselves with tried-and-tested ideas that provide clear inspiration for our own policies.” In recent memory, she notes by way of example, health care in Britain was a congeries of charity hospitals, rural clinics, and private practices that confined good medical care to those who could afford it, leaving the rest to fend for themselves, very much like America today. Reforms enacted by social activists and strong political leadership led to the national program that, despite the cries of right-wing critics, actually works quite well: As Hakimi Zapata notes, her out-of-pocket payments have been confined to a few vaccinations not covered by national insurance for travel abroad. One such country a couple of generations ago was Singapore, where every citizen has access to housing—and, more, to homeownership, a stake in the game. Norway, once a highly conservative society, leads the world in social programs that include evenly shared, subsidized parenting duties, “a more equal division of family responsibilities in both the short and long term.” Hakimi Zapata does note that bureaucracies attached to these programs can sometimes be cumbersome and difficult to negotiate, but the outcomes are unmistakable: Finland leads the world in education—“our only treasure,” one administrator says. As for the United States? “America is not working for the majority of us,” Hakimi Zapata writes. “Instead it’s working for a tiny superrich minority that amassed its wealth on the back of our collective labor—and our collective impoverishment.”
Full of lessons for American activists on how to bring enhanced social welfare programs into reality, despite the odds.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781620978443
Page Count: 432
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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