An invigorating book with much fodder for thought on this side of the Atlantic.
Vigorous polemic on the makeup of England’s ruling elite, with eerie parallels to the inequality in the United States.
Guardian columnist Jones (Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, 2012) embarks on another scathing examination of British systemic ailments by directly challenging the powerful interest groups that essentially rule the country. Politicians, financial titans, media barons, and an authoritative police force form the pillars of society, and since the 1950s, when Britain collectively shook off the “defeatism” and “permissiveness” of the postwar era in order to embrace an “open economy,” these pillars have turned increasingly reactionary. Where once the aristocracy and Church of England formed the Establishment (both still hold enormous tracts of land, the author notes), the “outriders” who championed the return to laissez faire economics at the Mont Pelerin Society of 1947 (Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman et al.) got their deliverance with the accession of Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s. They forged a new Establishment, founded on free market principles and libertarian philosophy. In the U.S. under Ronald Reagan, that philosophy was reflected in the attempt to roll back FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society programs. Jones looks at the role of conservative think tanks, such as the powerful Institute of Economic Affairs, in launching an all-out offensive on the working class, the trade unions, and the “little people.” This offensive often goes hand in hand with a 24-hour news cycle that popularizes their ideas to the public. In successive chapters, the author tackles one pillar after the other: the “Westminster Cartel”; a dishonest, corporate-fed media playing into racism and other prejudices (e.g., the Rupert Murdoch press); the “boys in blue,” who are authorized to use unlawful force; and tax dodgers and financiers operating with impunity. The supreme irony, Jones emphasizes, is that these “free-market” pillars actually derive their power from the “largesse of the state.”
An invigorating book with much fodder for thought on this side of the Atlantic.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61219-487-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
An invigoratingly candid memoir from a giant of women’s rights.
A respected feminist activist’s memoir about the life lessons she learned as a peripatetic political organizer.
Until she was 10 years old, Steinem (Moving Beyond Words, 1993, etc.) grew up following two parents who could never seem to put down roots. Only after her stability-craving mother separated from her restlessly migratory father did she settle—for a brief time until college—into “the most conventional life” she would ever lead. After that, she began travels that would first take her to Europe and then later to India, where she began to awaken to the possibility that her father’s lonely way of traveling “wasn’t the only one.” Journeying could be a shared experience that could lead to breakthroughs in consciousness of the kind Steinem underwent after observing Indian villagers coming together in “talking circles” to discuss community issues. Once she returned to the United States, she went to New York City, where she became an itinerant freelance journalist. After observing the absence of female voices at the 1963 March on Washington, Steinem began gathering together black and white women to begin the conversation that would soon become a larger national fight for women’s rights. In the 1970s and beyond, Steinem went on the road to campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment and for female political candidates like 1984 vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. Along the way, Steinem began work with Native American women activists who taught her about the interconnectedness of all living things and the importance of balance. From this, she learned to walk the middle path between a life on the road and one at home: for in the end, she writes, "[c]aring for a home is caring for one's self.” Illuminating and inspiring, this book presents a distinguished woman's exhilarating vision of what it means to live with openness, honesty, and a willingness to grow beyond the apparent confinement of seemingly irreconcilable polarities.
An invigoratingly candid memoir from a giant of women’s rights.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-679-45620-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A memoir of sorts that blurs the boundary between the personal and the universal.
An American poet of Japanese descent illuminates the tensions that exploded with World War II and the aftershocks within his family.
By the time Shimoda (The Desert, 2018, etc.) came to know his grandfather, the latter was suffering from Alzheimer’s, and thus it was only after his death that the author began to untangle the narrative of his life as a citizen of one country living in another. The resonance of the story that he pieces together, through pilgrimages back to Japan and across the United States, extends well beyond a single family or ethnicity to the soul of his own native country, where “white settlers were the original aliens. They sought to diffuse their alienation, by claiming the land and controlling the movement and rights of the people for whom the land was not alien, but ancestral.” Shimoda’s grandfather was conceived in Honolulu and born in Japan, and he crossed the ocean to Seattle as a 9-year-old boy, without the rest of his family. World War II turned him into an “enemy alien,” though, as the author writes, “he was not born an enemy alien. He was made into an enemy alien. The first (alien) phase was immigration. The third (enemy) phase was the attack on Pearl Harbor. The second phase was the transition. Which was, for a Japanese man, ineligible for citizenship, compulsory.” He was a trained photographer, and by all evidence, a very good and sensitive one, but the main offense on which he was initially incarcerated was possessing a camera. Shimoda wades through memories and dreams; lives and graves that have no names documented; unspeakable horrors committed by the country where his grandfather lived on the people of his native country; and the attempts to memorialize what is too graphically terrible to remember. By the end, writes the author, “I was just learning how to see.”
A memoir of sorts that blurs the boundary between the personal and the universal.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-87286-790-1
Page Count: 186
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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