Of narrower interest than Monied Metropolis but a valuable contribution all the same.
Beckert (History/Harvard Univ.; The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896, 2001) writes convincingly of cotton as the impetus for a world-system kind of capitalism.
Cotton, of course, has been grown and worked for millennia, long before the development of capitalism. As the author observes, initially cotton required efforts so labor-intensive that cotton goods had outsized value: “Rulers everywhere demanded cotton cloth as tribute or taxes, and indeed it might be said that cotton was present at the birth of political economy as such.” The shift in the Industrial Revolution to mass production removed some of the allure and value, moving cotton from household to factory and shifting cultivation from small plots to large plantations—and, importantly, forging international links among banks, markets, suppliers and shippers around the world. In one case study, Beckert weaves the stories of towns in the Black Forest of Germany, the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and the American South into a neat fabric. Market production meant the development of new systems of banking and credit, thus remaking the world of finance, with European credit in particular being instrumental in furthering the development of the slave economy in the United States. Beckert’s narrative sometimes threatens to grind to a halt amid an overabundance of detail, but his conclusions and asides are fascinating—as when, for example, he puts the lie to the idea that ours is an age of deindustrialization “when exactly the opposite is true, as the greatest wave of industrialization ever has overtaken the globe.” In that light, his close-up study of the cotton economy is a valuable model for the study of capitalism generally, an economic system in which slavery and colonialism were not outliers but instead integral to the whole.
Of narrower interest than Monied Metropolis but a valuable contribution all the same.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0375414145
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A...
Valediction from the late neurologist and writer Sacks (On the Move: A Life, 2015, etc.).
In this set of four short essays, much-forwarded opinion pieces from the New York Times, the author ponders illness, specifically the metastatic cancer that spread from eye to liver and in doing so foreclosed any possibility of treatment. His brief reflections on that unfortunate development give way to, yes, gratitude as he examines the good things that he has experienced over what, in the end, turned out to be a rather long life after all, lasting 82 years. To be sure, Sacks has regrets about leaving the world, not least of them not being around to see “a thousand…breakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences,” as well as the night sky sprinkled with stars and the yellow legal pads on which he worked sprinkled with words. Sacks works a few familiar tropes and elaborates others. Charmingly, he reflects on his habit since childhood of associating each year of his life with the element of corresponding atomic weight on the periodic table; given polonium’s “intense, murderous radioactivity,” then perhaps 84 isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. There are some glaring repetitions here, unfortunate given the intense brevity of this book, such as his twice citing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s call to revel in “intercourse with the world”—no, not that kind. Yet his thoughts overall—while not as soul-stirringly inspirational as the similar reflections of Randy Pausch or as bent on chasing down the story as Christopher Hitchens’ last book—are shaped into an austere beauty, as when Sacks writes of being able in his final moments to “see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.”
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A fitting, lovely farewell.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-49293-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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.
Atlanticsenior 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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