by Rhona Mahony ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 1995
An odd, unconvincing case for breadwinning mommies and homemaking daddies. Harvard-trained lawyer, columnist, and mother Mahony fears that women will remain subject to glass ceilings, the ``second shift,'' spousal abuse, and economic peril unless they get men to do half the work of raising children. According to the author, this doesn't mean 5050 parenting, each spouse working half-time; it means half of all families nurtured by stay-at-home fathers. Mahony draws lots of graphs and borrows lots of jargon from economics, game theory, psychology, and anthropology to show how various hypothetical, overly generalized couples negotiate badly over who does the laundry. Despite her pedantic posturing, she has a strong point: A woman's economic dependence on a breadwinning male can rob her of both bargaining power and self-esteem. But her thesis—that the only way for women to shore up bargaining power at home is by fleeing from the nursery en masse—is not likely to win converts. The author is simply too dismissive of mother-baby bonding, maternal instinct, breast-feeding, and the sundry arrangements many women choose, such as maternity leave and part-time work. She is also too rigid about the necessity of a parent at home, scorning day care by ``some six-dollar-an-hour hireling who will abandon [the baby] in three months to sell nose rings at the mall.'' Mahony is not above informing the reader how she divides parenting chores with her spouse or dispensing parent-mag household tips (``Bagel pizzas and yogurt smoothies make an elegant meal''). Those seeking specific advice on how to negotiate child care will be disappointed, although they might be intrigued by her suggestion that a moralistic quotation from the Bible now and then ``may make all the difference.'' Too judgmental and pretentious to earn a wide readership.
Pub Date: June 21, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-08593-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
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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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
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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