Eschewing both “revolution [and] resignation,” Romeo offers a powerful addition to an urgent debate.
Romeo spins a series of New Yorker articles into a cohesive argument that there are alternatives “to our disastrous economic status quo.”
The author opens by challenging the basic received truth in neoclassical economics that it is a science, operating under its own set of ineluctable laws and with no political or moral dimension. This alone is worth the price of admission, revealing the increasingly narrow perspective promulgated by academia and the flexibility of thought that comes with the introduction of other disciplines, including history, philosophy, and psychology. Romeo then goes on to survey eight different real-world models based in such heterodox thought: true pricing of consumer goods; the movement for an actual living wage; job guarantees; gig-work platforms that operate as public utilities; worker-owned cooperatives; perpetual purpose trusts that “dethrone shareholder primacy and profit maximization”; participatory budgeting at the municipal level; and the use of private equity to create employee stock ownership plans. Such an exploration may sound technocratic, but Romeo never loses his thread: that these approaches are based on both sound economic policy and a commitment to reject the immiseration of an underclass as an “economic necessity.” Variations on decent, moral, and ethical suffuse the text, continually challenging readers to look beyond cost-benefit analyses; that author argues that “no amount of added value for shareholders…can justify the existence of child labor.” Though the examples Romeo presents are satisfyingly mind-bending, they are largely limited to Europe and the U.S. While this effectively establishes proof of concept in developed economies, it ignores whatever innovation may be taking place in the global south and elsewhere that might further upend traditional economic thought. Nevertheless, it makes a terrific complement to Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America for readers looking for practical solutions.
Eschewing both “revolution [and] resignation,” Romeo offers a powerful addition to an urgent debate.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781541701595
Page Count: 384
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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