Two historians offer a brief look at the role women have played in the evolution of Portland, Oregon.
Prince (Culture Wars in British Literature, 2012, etc.) and debut author Schaffer highlight the many notable ways women have shaped Oregon’s largest city in this informative book, part of Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series. The authors’ aim was “to do our part to mend the telling of Portland’s history,” which has traditionally focused on men. In particular, they draw attention to the lives of Native Americans and other women of color. They begin with the “forgotten history” of the city before the arrival of white settlers in the 1840s and continue through the post–World War II era into the present. Separate chapters cover women in the arts from the 1890s onward (such as noted children’s author Beverly Cleary) and women in politics from the 1920s to today. As with other volumes in this series, the emphasis is on historical photographs, newspaper clippings, and other documents, which are accompanied by short captions. The result is a visually interesting but necessarily scattershot history. Still, the authors have wisely chosen to concentrate on certain themes, such as the fight for women’s suffrage or women’s work on the homefront during World War II, which helps to provide an overarching context to the text and images. In some cases, more details would have been helpful in understanding the broader historical events that provided the backdrop to the women’s actions. For example, a number of African American women who fought for civil rights are admirably profiled, but a statement that Oregon’s 1953 law banning discrimination in public accommodations put it “a decade ahead of the nation in passing civil rights laws” downplays the state’s troubling history of racial exclusion. Yet the authors are to be commended for their efforts to document the experiences of a diverse group of Portland women. Many of them seem ripe for a more in-depth exploration, such as Lucy A. Mallory, a suffragist and writer whom Tolstoy once called the “greatest woman in America.”
While its visually focused approach doesn’t dig deep, this book deftly spotlights lesser-known figures from Portland’s past.Pub Date: June 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4671-2505-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Arcadia Books
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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“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. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
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