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AN UNLIKELY AUDIENCE

AL JAZEERA'S STRUGGLE IN AMERICA

An interesting but very academic history of a polarizing media presence.

The rise and fall and plateau of a controversial media outlet’s attempt to penetrate the American market.

This well-researched but lackluster account of media conglomerate Al Jazeera’s attempts to make inroads to Western audiences started as a graduate school dissertation and largely still reads like one. Youmans (Media and Public Affairs/George Washington Univ.) tracks the burgeoning media network from its launch of Al Jazeera English in 2006 through the abrupt shuttering of Al Jazeera America in 2016. The author opens with an examination of the enormous regulatory and administrative hurdles the Qatar-backed channel had to overcome just to broadcast in the first place as well as the deep-rooted philosophical bias against the Middle East–based outlet in the wake of 9/11. Youmans argues that the best way to understand the arc of Al Jazeera is by diving into its distinct operations in Washington, D.C., New York City, and San Francisco, breaking down its mechanics at the local level in order to understand how it analyzes and affects the world. “The awkward portmanteau ‘glocalization’ refers to the co-occurrence of ‘universalizing and particularizing’ forces in the movement of global goods, people and services,” he writes. Unfortunately, for readers who are not media analysts, it doesn’t get much more exciting than this, barring a couple of exceptions. Youmans does take a bracing deep dive into the 2011 emergence of the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East, as Al Jazeera finally freed itself of the negative associations of the Gulf Wars and became a real presence on the global stage. Late in the book, the author also portrays the intriguing contrast between the now-defunct Al Jazeera America in New York City and its more daring digital startup, AJ+, which is still flourishing in the innovative media aquarium of San Francisco.

An interesting but very academic history of a polarizing media presence.

Pub Date: June 1, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-19-065572-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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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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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

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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