As we head into the presidential primary season, Greenberg’s book couldn’t be timelier, more disturbing for the Republicans,...
A prominent Democratic strategist and pollster lays out a reform agenda for the future.
Pity the Republican Party. Condemned in the 21st century to fighting a rear-guard action against a series of demographic, economic, and social trends that include more racial diversity, stepped-up immigration, differing family structures, new energy sources, and increasing secularism, the GOP continues to battle. Adviser to a variety of center-left politicians, home and abroad, from Bill Clinton to Nelson Mandela, Greenberg (Dispatches from the War Room: In the Trenches with Five Extraordinary Leaders, 2009, etc.) relies on his own research—surveys and focus groups—commentary from economists, political scientists, sociologists, and reporters, and numerous graphs and charts to make this case and to argue for a progressive response to the changes wrought by the technological era. He compares the current moment to the similarly disruptive Industrial Revolution, during which a succession of Democratic presidents initiated a raft of social reforms that sanded off the rough edges of the economy and culture and allowed the nation to become pre-eminent. In smooth, almost chatty prose, Greenberg argues the time is ripe for a bold progressive agenda that addresses the societal perturbations of our own time, that history “is on the side of the ascendant revolutions” that will inevitably overwhelm opponents. Unsurprisingly, the author calls for increased government activism speaking to issues like climate change, wage disparity, the renewal of our cities, our education system, and infrastructure, and a commitment to full employment. To the already converted and those who shudder at the mention of the Koch brothers and laugh at the scrum of Republicans aspiring to the White House, the author’s analysis will appear spot-on. Greenberg’s confident, well-researched, and well-written delivery may even persuade some skeptics. At least half the country though, the soon-to-be-extinct half, according to the author, will remain unconvinced.
As we head into the presidential primary season, Greenberg’s book couldn’t be timelier, more disturbing for the Republicans, or more challenging for those looking to lead the Democrats.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-00367-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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