An incisive survey of vast recent changes in American society and the ever-wider generation gap between baby boomers and millennials.
In this well-written, data-rich book, Taylor (See How They Run: Electing the President in an Age of Mediaocracy, 1990, etc.), executive vice president of the Pew Research Center and a former Washington Post reporter, examines the demographic, economic, social, cultural and technological changes that are reshaping the nation. His key focus is on the problem of generational equity: “[A]s our population ages, how do we keep our promises to the old without bankrupting the young and starving the future?” Furthermore, he writes, the generations are “divided by race, politics, values, religion, and technology to a degree that’s rare in our history.” Some 76 million boomers are aging, worried about retirement and lamenting that they aren’t young anymore. The 80 million millennials (born after 1980) are empowered by technology, coddled by parents, slow to embrace the responsibilities of adulthood, and comfortable with racial, ethnic and sexual diversity. At the same time, both groups face money troubles: Older Americans lack retirement savings, and young people have dismal job prospects. Yet the generations are highly interdependent; they are each others’ children and parents, with 40 percent of millennial men (and 32 percent of women) living in their parents’ homes in 2012. With the helpful charts and graphs, Taylor tells these generational stories against the larger background of a nation that is growing older, more unequal, more diverse, more mixed racially, more digitally linked, more tolerant, less married, less fertile, less religious, less mobile and less confident. He examines everything from intermarriage, the graying workforce and the gap-widening digital landscape to the new immigrants whose striving drives the growth of the country. Taylor is confident pragmatic Americans will avoid an intergenerational war and that the societal changes recounted here will ultimately compel reform of the social security and Medicare systems to provide for tomorrow’s retirees.
An authoritative report and required reading for policymakers.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-350-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
Categories: UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES
Did you like this book?
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2022 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
