Book Review: The spirit level by Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

Author: Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Title: The spirit level : why greater equality makes societies stronger by
Publication Info: Tantor Media (2011)
ISBN: 1452655057
Summary/Review: The thesis of this book is that greater equality creates a better society is a no-brainer for me.  But we live in an age where there are some who promote greater inequality and deny the need for society at all.  The authors richly illustrate the advantages of equality and the disadvantages of inequality in our world. This is probably not a work to listen to as an audiobook as I think  for my mind it requires greater attention and study.

Rating: **

Book Review: The Whites of Their Eyes by Jill Lepore

Author: Jill Lepore
Title: The Whites of Their Eyes: the Tea Party’s revolution and the battle over American history
Publication Info: Princeton : Princeton University Press, c2010.
ISBN: 9780691150277
Summary/Review: Harvard historian Jill Lepore investigates the rhetoric of the Tea Party particularly the claim by many right-wing politicians to speak to the original intent of the Revolutionary generation and the framers of the Constitution.  Lepore meets with Tea Party activists in the Boston area and respectfully reports their views while not leaving them unchallenged.  Lepore also writes about the historical figures of the Revolution and how their memory is claimed and interpreted throughout American political history (particularly by left-wing activists during the Bicentennial celebration).  The book skips around a bit  – especially distracting in the later pages – but it is a good, brief journalistic take on the politics of cultural memory.
Favorite Passages:

The founders were not prophets.  Nor did they hope to be worshiped.  They believed that to defer without examination to what your forefathers believed is to become a slave to the tyranny of the past. – p. 113

Citizens and their elected officials have all sorts of reasons to support or oppose all sorts of legislation and government action, including constitutionality, precedence and the weight of history.  But it’s possible to cherish the stability of the law and the durability of the Constitution, as amended over two and a half centuries of change and one civil war, and tested in the courts, without dragging the Founding Fathers from their graves.  To point this out neither dishonors the past nor relieves anyone of the obligation to study it.  The the contrary.

“What would the founders do?” is, from the point of view  of historical analysis, an ill-considered and unanswerable question, and pointless, too.  Jurists and legislators need to investigate what the framers meant, and some Christians make moral decisions by wondering what Jesus would do, but no NASA scientist decides what to do about the Hubble by asking what Isaac Newton would make of it.  People who ask what the founders would do quite commonly declare that they know, they know, they just know what the founders would do and, mostly it comes to this: if only the could see us now, they would be rolling over in their graves.  …

That’s not  history.  It’s not civil religion, the faith in democracy that binds Americans together.  It’s not original ism or even constitutionalism.  That’s fundamentalism.  – p. 124-25

This, I guess, was the belly of the beast, the alarming left-wing lunacy, the godless irreverence, the socialist political indocrination taught in the public schools of the People’s Republic of Cambridge: an assignment that requires research, that raises questions about perspective, that demands distinctions between fact and opinion, that bears an audience in mind — an assignment that teaches the art of historical writing. – p. 161

Recommended books: Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America by Steven Waldman, The Purpose of the Past by Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionaries by Jack Rakove, and The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution by Alfred F. Young
Rating: ***

Retropost: Confessions of a St. Patrick’s Day Curmudgeon

In honor of this special day let’s revisit one of my favorite posts.

While most kids look forward to Christmas, when I was a child, St. Patrick’s Day (along with Thanksgiving) was one of my favorite days of the year.  It was a big day in my family usually involving going to the parade in New York and seeing family and friends we hadn’t seen in a while.  Then there was the music, the stories of St. Patrick, the history of Ireland and the Irish in America.  Growing up in a town where the dominant population was Ital … Read More

Related Posts:

• St. Patrick
• St. Patrick’s Day
• Holyoke St. Patrick’s Day Parade
• Top Ten Irish Books

Worst Night of the Year Keeps Coming Back

A friend of mine called me “crankypants” yesterday because of it, but I still hate switching to Daylight Saving Time.  I’ve been congested and sleeping poorly the past week so I didn’t need to lose an hour of sleep on top of that.

Anyhow, I like this quote attributed to some unnamed Native American (who is thus probably entirely fictional) but speaks the truth:

When told the reason for daylight saving time the old Indian said… “Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket.”

I also like this article “The 5 Stages of Daylight Saving Time” by fellow conspiracy victim Jennifer Fulwiler.

Earlier screeds against Daylight Saving Time:

• The Worst Night of the Year
• Retropost: The Worst Night of the Year
• Worst Night of the Year … Redux

Book Review: Pedal Power by J. Harry Wray

Author: J. Harry Wray
Title: Pedal power : the quiet rise of the bicycle in American public life
Publication Info: Boulder, Colo. : Paradigm Publishers, c2008.
ISBN: 9781594514623

Summary/Review:

Wray writes in a dry, professorial tone about bicycle culture in the United States through a political science approach.  While not the best written book it does have a lot of interesting facts and ideas about American cyclists.  I think this book is best summarized with a little bit about each chapter

1. Contrasting Visions – Wray introduces his political science method and explains that he will be writing about the political importance of bicycling.
2. Biking in Amsterdam – A visit to the bike friendly city delves into the history of how bicycle accommodations were created and what effect they have on that city’s politics and culture.
3. Culture Storm – Examining the way that Americans self-identify as “individualists” and how this identity appears to clash with bike culture.
4. Biking Eccentrics – The stories of a people Wray knows in Chicago who have committed themselves to a bicycle-based lifestyle.
5. Building the Case – Political advocates such as the League of American Bicyclists and Chicago Bicycle Federation.
6. Pushing the Envelope – Organizations and leaderless movements on the cutting edge of bicycling including Critical Mass, SHIFT, ChiTown Cruisers, and The Rat Patrol.
7. Politicians Who Matter – Portraits of a few elected leaders who have bicycle-lifestyles and are leaders of bicycle-friendly legislation.
8. Metapolitics, Minibikes – The political effect of bicycling in reaction to environmental degradation and global warming.

All in all this is a good introductory look at the important political issues of the day relating to bicycling.

Recommended books: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do by Tom Vanderbilt, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back by Jane Holtz Kay
Rating:  ***

Book Review: The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 by Paul Krugman

Author: Paul Krugman
Title: The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
Publication Info: Books On Tape (2009), Audio CD
ISBN: 1415965080

Previously read: The Great Unraveling

Summary/Review:

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman writes a brief overview of what he calls “depression economics” that arose from the perfect storm of events that brought down the global economy in 2008.  Much of the book is a revised form of an earlier book about fiscal crises in Latin America and Asia in the 1980s and 1990s.  These earlier crises should have been a clue to what could go wrong with the bubble economy of the 2000s but most of the people who should have known better thought that depression economics were a thing of the past.  Krugman does a good job of explaining what went wrong and offers solutions to prevent a repeat: regulate anything that works like a bank as a bank and allow governments to offer stimulus to the economy when needed.  These solutions seem obvious of course but Krugman also explains how these reforms work and what happens when they’re missing.  In short this is a good overview of the fiscal crisis for the non-economist that is written in an engaging, sometimes even humorous, manner.

Recommended books: Free Lunch David Cay Johnston, What’s the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank and The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz
Rating: ***

Worst Night of the Year…Redux

Daylight Savings Time begins today meaning that we will have a greater risk of on-the-job injuries according to Scientific American.  And The Christian Science Monitor reports that changing our clocks will cost us money.  The Monitor rightly asks why is that we spring forward again?

Ugh!  Join me in hoping that this silly — and dangerous — tradition will end someday soon.

Related posts:

• The Worst Night of the Year
• Retropost: The Worst Night of the Year.

Left Ahead Podcasts on Transportation

One of the local blogs I read regularly – Marry in Massachusetts – is written by a man who also participates in the Left Ahead podcast.  I don’t listen to this podcast regularly but I did download the latest two episodes since they deal with an issue near and dear to my heart: public transportation.  The first episode interviews Massachusetts Lt. Governor Tim Murray and the second is a talk with former Governor Mike Dukakis, two leaders who seem to get the importance of public transportation.  I highly recommend listening to these two podcasts.

Book Review: Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston

Author: David Cay Johnston
Title: Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill)
Publication Info: Penguin Audio (2007), Edition: Abridged, Audio CD
ISBN:  0143142968

Summary/Review:

I listened to this audiobook that details the cushy relationship between corporations and politicians that has allowed the rich to become exorbitantly rich at the taxpayer’s expense.  The book is mostly anectdotes of corporate socialism in action:

• A railroad crash that kills passengers is due to negligence of the company that owns the tracks, CSX, yet the corporation has been able to get legal protection from the government if the train damaged belongs to Amtrak and thus the government pays the legal fees.
• The geniuses at Enron convince the governments of several states to lift regulations and allow the free market to bring about more energy at lower prices.  Yet neither happens as prices rise and rolling blackouts darken California.  Even after the accounting scandals bring Enron execs to court they never pay back the money stolen from the public purse and official documents are struck from the public record.
• Cabela’s sporting goods store wrangles money from local governments to build superstores with “museums” and ask to pay no taxes and in return put local stores out of business and destroy the local tax base.
• Sports’ franchises – with antitrust exemptions that prevent them from needing to compete in the free market – hold cities for ransom and pay for construction of stadiums with public money.  Most interesting is the story of the owner of the Texas Rangers who acquired the team, had a new stadium built on a tax increase, and sold the team for a tidy profit without ever investing a cent of his own money. That owner was the man who supported nothing but tax cuts and free markets as president, George W. Bush.

This quote from Kel Munger of the Sacramento News & Review sums it up best:

If taxpayers were only taxed for public services, we’d all be a lot better off. Instead, we’re taxed to support business propositions that could never make it in a truly free market economy. The people sucking wage-earners dry are not welfare mothers, illegal immigrants, the disabled, elderly, sick or needy. That giant sucking sound that comes from wage-earners’ wallets is made by rich folks with pumps at the end of their straws.

It’s a frustrating book, all the more so since in a sense it doesn’t reveal any big secrets.  Government handouts and legislation in favor of corporations at the expense of the citizens is a well-known fact of modern America that people either feel hopeless at changing or chose to be willfully ignorant (kind of like a Stockholm Syndrome to our corporate captors).  I’m not sure if Johnston’s chapter on solutions is much help.  Among other things he proposed the taxpayer fully subsidizing Congressional representatives to keep them from accepting money from corporate lobbyists. Still, knowledge is power.

Recommended books: Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights by Thom Hartmann, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century by Paul R. Krugman and What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank
Rating: ***

Book Review: The Tent of Abraham: Stories of Hope and Peace for Jews, Christians, and Muslims

The Tent of Abraham: Stories of Hope and Peace for Jews, Christians, and Muslims (2006) by Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Joan Chittister, OSB, and Murshid Saadi Shakur Chisti tells the scriptural stories of Abraham and the conflict that rages between the peoples descended from his two sons, Jewish from Isaac and Islamic from Ishmael. The book begins with two tellings of Abraham’s journey, one from the Jewish scriptures and midrash and one from the Quran.  Toward the end of the book there is a combined account that acts as a guide for beginning to find common ground.

The heart of the book is where each of the authors takes turns writing interpretations of Abraham’s journey from the perspective of their religion.  These take the form of series of short, interelated essays both on scriptural studies and the current crisis among the Israelis and Palestinians.  These essays can be very beautiful and insightful as well as educational offering new takes on Abraham’s story in the Bible and the completely new-to-me Islamic telling of Abraham’s story.  Rabbi Waskow has an interesting take on Abraham being the most dangerous person in the lives of his two sons: one he banished into the desert  the other he tried to sacrifice. Both would have died if not for divine intervention.  Sr. Joan reflects on many conferences of Israeli and Palestine woman working to end the killing of all their children.

The appendices of the book include resources for “pitching your own tent” and working toward peace among the peoples of all three faiths as well as some related essays by other authors.

Favorite Passages

When either community mourns the death only of those on “its side” who have been killed by those on “the other side,” the outcome is often more rage, more hatred, and more death.  If we can share the grief for those dead on both “sides,” we are more likely to see each other as human beings and move toward ending the violence. – p. 59-60, Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Now, thousands of years later, Israelis and Palestinians are locked in mortal battle over the precise measurement of whose land is whose.  The painful attempt not to be cheated is, ironically, cheating both of them out of peace and fellowship and trust. And all the while, it was  precisely Abraham’s decision not to invoke his right as the elder to chose the land that would be his.  It is a painful lesson lost.  The even greater concern is that unless both peoples discover that less can be more, the more their rights they get – unlike Abraham, who was willing to trust the soul of the other – the poorer in spirit they will all be.  – p. 97, Joan Chittister

A human being is capable of holding vastly different and paradoxical points of view at the same time.  We seem to have so many different voices within us, and our motivations are often unconscious.  So simply nodding in agreement is no guarantee that I will act the way I intend. … So I find myself called not to more thoughts but bigger thoughts and feelings accompanied by real action, based on the experience of a greater reality we all share. – p. 132-33. Murshid Saadi Shakur Chisti