A rewarding account that supports the adage that what’s past is prologue.
Americans of a century ago were much like those of today, facing an uncertain future while trying to make sense of the present.
In the late 1920s, behavioral scientists Settersten, Elder, and Pearce recount, an enterprising psychologist at the Berkeley Institute of Child Welfare formulated a longitudinal study that would take a sample of those born between 1885 and 1908—the “1900 generation”—and track them and their children throughout their lives. By 1929, about 200 couples living in the Berkeley area were involved. “Foreign birth stood out as the most pervasive cultural feature of the couples’ family backgrounds,” the authors write, with only a third having two parents born in the U.S. Being foreign-born often entailed certain social and economic disadvantages, especially if the foreign-born person was from southern Europe and Catholic. Still, some of today’s verities held then. Education, for example, was a key predictor of economic success in a time when economic inequality was becoming more pronounced. Interestingly, the authors write, the Depression affected people of different educational and economic backgrounds differently. Middle-class and professional workers were often furloughed for one day of the week and welcomed the chance to spend the extra time with their families, discovering that the loss of income was also matched by a decline in consumer prices, whereas working-class people carried a more difficult burden. “The good times made their hard times more difficult to bear,” the authors write of working-class men, and the hard times were worse, so that the setbacks of the Depression left a “deep imprint on their life records.” Most were uplifted economically by the booming war economy, though of course many had sons who served in combat. They often felt tremendous social change that was continuing to accelerate, reminding us, the authors write sagely, that “our lives are not our own but are embedded in family relationships and interactions that shape us.”
A rewarding account that supports the adage that what’s past is prologue.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-226-74812-2
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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