Though this book will probably tell you more than you really want or need to know about the malpractices and deficiencies of...
An angry, disturbing look at American labor unions that examines the reasons they have so often failed their members and society generally.
Why have America’s unions lost so many members, not kept labor standards from declining and been unable to exercise real political influence in recent decades? Fitch, himself a union member, has a one-word answer: corruption. In great, occasionally numbing detail, he chronicles key events and characters that have shaped American unions from the end of the 19th century to the present. It’s a chronicle rife with bribery, theft, violence and betrayal, often of union members by union officials. Fitch focuses not only on criminal corruption but on nepotism and favoritism that help keep self-serving, incompetent union officials in power and foster feudal-like organizations in which sub-bosses owe their primary allegiance to the higher-ups. Such organizational structures, according to Fitch, have kept American unions inward-looking and ineffective when it comes to getting the kind of benefits available to all workers, union and non-union, one finds in Western Europe, where a more inclusive political unionism prevails. In his critique, Fitch finds no heroes. He knocks labor icons like Ron Carey and Andy Stern; finds serious fault with public as well as private unions; trashes would-be socialist reformers as ineffectual when not actually corrupted by the institutions they seek to reform; and mocks leftist intellectuals he believes are blinkered when it comes to the realities of American union behavior.
Though this book will probably tell you more than you really want or need to know about the malpractices and deficiencies of specific union locals, it boasts a slew of keen insights and stands as an important read for anyone who cares about the future of organized labor in America.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-891620-72-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A valiant effort to explain and make peace with war’s awesome consequences for human beings.
A manual for soldiers or anyone interested in what can happen to mind, body and spirit in the extreme circumstances of war.
Decorated Vietnam veteran Marlantes is also the author of a bestselling novel (Matterhorn, 2010), a Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar. His latest book reflects both his erudition and his battle-hardness, taking readers from the Temple of Mars and Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey into the hell of combat and its grisly aftermath. That Marlantes has undertaken such a project implies his acceptance of war as a permanent fact of human life. We go to war, he says, “reluctantly and sadly” to eliminate an evil, just as one must kill a mad dog, “because it is a loathsome task that a conscious person sometimes has to do.” He believes volunteers rather than conscripts make the best soldiers, and he accepts that the young, who thrill at adventure and thrive on adrenaline, should be war’s heavy lifters. But apologizing for war is certainly not one of the strengths, or even aims, of the book. Rather, Marlantes seeks to prepare warriors for the psychic wounds they may endure in the name of causes they may not fully comprehend. In doing that, he also seeks to explain to nonsoldiers (particularly policymakers who would send soldiers to war) the violence that war enacts on the whole being. Marlantes believes our modern states fail where “primitive” societies succeeded in preparing warriors for battle and healing their psychic wounds when they return. He proposes the development of rituals to practice during wartime, to solemnly pay tribute to the terrible costs of war as they are exacted, rather than expecting our soldiers to deal with them privately when they leave the service. He believes these rituals, in absolving warriors of the guilt they will and probably should feel for being expected to violate all of the sacred rules of civilization, could help slow the epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans.
A valiant effort to explain and make peace with war’s awesome consequences for human beings.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1992-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
Despite the whopping length, there's not a wasted word in this superb, swiftly moving narrative, which brings new and...
A great, troubled, and, it seems, overlooked president receives his due from the Pulitzer-winning historian/biographer McCullough (Truman, 1992, etc.).
John Adams, to gauge by the letters and diaries from which McCullough liberally quotes, did not exactly go out of his way to assume a leadership role in the tumultuous years of the American Revolution, though he was always “ambitious to excel.” Neither, however, did he shy from what he perceived to be a divinely inspired historical necessity; he took considerable personal risks in spreading the American colonists’ rebellion across his native Massachusetts. Adams gained an admirable reputation for fearlessness and for devotion not only to his cause but also to his beloved wife Abigail. After the Revolution, though he was quick to yield to the rebellion's military leader, George Washington, part of the reason that the New England states enjoyed influence in a government dominated by Virginians was the force of Adams's character. His lifelong nemesis, who tested that character in many ways, was also one of his greatest friends: Thomas Jefferson, who differed from Adams in almost every important respect. McCullough depicts Jefferson as lazy, a spendthrift, always in debt and always in trouble, whereas Adams never rested and never spent a penny without good reason, a holdover from the comparative poverty of his youth. Despite their sometimes vicious political battles (in a bafflingly complex environment that McCullough carefully deconstructs), the two shared a love of books, learning, and revolutionary idealism, and it is one of those wonderful symmetries of history that both died on the same day, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. While McCullough never misses an episode in Adams's long and often troubled life, he includes enough biographical material on Jefferson that this can be considered two biographies for the price of one—which explains some of its portliness.
Despite the whopping length, there's not a wasted word in this superb, swiftly moving narrative, which brings new and overdue honor to a Founding Father.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-81363-7
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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