The fight on behalf of household workers for the “3 P’s: pay, protection, and professionalism” continues. Look to Nadasen’s...
Scholar/activist Nadasen (History/Barnard Coll.; Rethinking the Welfare Rights Movement, 2011, etc.) showcases the stories of African-American women who helped organize domestic workers from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Valuable for its recovery of a largely neglected piece of labor history, particularly one in which race, class, immigration, and gender intersect, this work may prove most useful as a how-to guide for those looking to effect change in the landscape of the new economy. Inspired by the civil rights and women’s rights movements, operating largely outside the formal labor movement, postwar household workers by necessity developed guerrilla strategies for demanding respect and fair treatment. The best parts of Nadasen’s book are the firsthand accounts from the women who embodied tactics like remaking the public image of domestics, using public spaces to organize, and employing storytelling to galvanize the need for change. They include Georgia Gilmore, who played a leading role organizing domestic workers in support of the famed Montgomery Bus Boycott; Atlanta's Dorothy Bolden, who helped found the National Domestic Workers Union; Cleveland-based Geraldine Roberts, who formed the Domestic Workers of America; and Detroit’s Mary McClendon, founder of the Household Workers Organization. These women and others strove to dispel the pernicious “mammy stereotype," and their stories are powerful and inspiring. Nadasen’s analysis, however, descends frequently into the wearisome academic jargon that too often accompanies her forthrightly admitted social justice perspective. However, specialists will likely appreciate her treatment of numerous subthemes, including feminists struggling with the ethics of paid household help, the mainstream labor unions mistakenly deeming domestic workers “unorganizable,” the racial tension within the movement arising from shifting demographics, and the peculiar dynamics of the mistress-maid relationship.
The fight on behalf of household workers for the “3 P’s: pay, protection, and professionalism” continues. Look to Nadasen’s history for an understanding of how the struggle began.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1450-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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