Alfred A. Knopf

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future

gwen — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Many people shy away from trying to understand economics. They assume that because they don’t know much about tax or trade policies, or because they don’t understand what a derivative on Wall Street is and does, that economics is too complicated, and they leave the fate of the economy in the hands of the “experts”. The trouble with this is that the experts often have a vested interest in keeping everyone else in the dark in order to make a profit.

Enter Robert Reich. In his newest book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, the former US Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton and currently professor at the University of California, Berkeley, manages to make a complicated topic digestible. He presents a thorough, yet easily accessible analysis of patterns in America’s economy since the Great Depression.

His underlying premise is that the American economy swings back and forth like a pendulum between times of economic contraction (to varying degrees) and times of economic growth and prosperity. He argues that in this pattern lies another pattern that provides the key to understanding why things went so horribly wrong in 2008 and have not gotten much better since: the concentration of income at the top and a flat growth of income for everyone else. Reich steps beyond the now common analyses that see the root of the economic crash in 2008 in the mortgage crisis or in the scrupulous behavior on Wall Street. He points out that while it is true that Wall Street’s strategy of betting against the American economy and making profits off of people losing their homes contributed to an accelerated downward spiral into the Great Recession, the real issue that led to the economic collapse has been the ongoing erosion of income for the vast majority of Americans.

Reich notes that in the year leading up to the crash in 2008, the top one percent of the American population earned twenty-three percent of the nation’s income. The last time income was so concentrated at the top in the US was in 1928, just before the Great Depression. He explains that the time of economic prosperity that the US experienced after 1945 was a result of macroeconomic policies that ensured a fairer distribution if income and wealth. The Social Security system, Medicare and Medicaid, regulation of the housing and loan market, increased power of labor unions to negotiate higher wages, and programs designed to create jobs were legacies of the New Deal that between 1947 and 1975 created a time where ordinary Americans earned enough money to consume the products they were producing. However, the pendulum swung back starting in the late 1970s. Reich points out that when it became increasingly difficult for American workers to be able to afford to consume, they turned to, and ultimately exhausted, three key coping mechanisms: women entering the workforce, working longer hours, and when that failed to generate enough income, borrowing against your house.

Reich puts the current Great Recession in political and historical perspective. He points out that the path toward the crash really started in the 1980s, when the emphasis on free-market economics and the linking of Wall Street and key decision-making position in politics made the pendulum swing away from a basic bargain that meant that average Americans could afford to live a decent life. He points out that the only way to really get out of the Great Recession is to reverse that trend and ensure that income is distributed more fairly to allow Americans to consume, which would trigger production of goods through increased demand, which in turn would trigger job growth.

Reich ends his book with a series of suggestions for how to achieve this: a reverse income tax, where those earning less than $20,000-$30,000 annually receive wage subsidies rather than paying income tax, higher marginal tax rates for the wealthy, a carbon tax, school vouchers that are based on family income, college loans linked to subsequent income, Medicare for all, and a delinking of money/corporate interests and politics. While this plan sounds utopian, especially given the current trend toward electing politicians who run on an even more drastic deregulation and anti-government platform, Reich makes it very clear that unless we make the pendulum swing toward fair distribution of income again, which can only be done through government action, the Great Recession is here to stay and might, ultimately, undermine the social and political peace in America.

We can’t afford to not understand this. We can’t afford to not understand economics.

Written by: Annette Przygoda, November 12th 2010

The Children's Book

admin — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 08:58:00 +0000

By A.S. Byatt

Alfred A. Knopf

When I think of the works of author A. S. Byatt, I think of layers built upon layers and stories within stories. The first novel I read by Byatt was Possession, and I found the story of two modern day English professors solving a love mystery enjoyable. With that said, however, I also found the book to be overly detailed, thinking at the time that 100 pages could easily have been edited out. When I delved into The Children's Book, I expected a similar reading experience, but I was pleasantly surprised that, at almost 700 pages, the novel flows nicely.

The setting for The Children's Book is Edwardian England during the years 1895-1919. The story surrounds the Wellwood family and their mysterious almost dreamlike existence. Olive Wellwood is the matriarch of the family and she, along with her husband Humphrey, are parents to seven very curious and passionate children. Olive writes children’s fairy tales for a living and for each of her children, she writes a special private story. Some of Olive’s tales are frightening and the reader who looks closely can see a correlation to her daily life.

The opening of the novel shows Olive taking in a young homeless boy named Philip who is a gifted artist. He becomes an apprentice to Benedict Fludd, a potter whose many dark secrets are hidden within his art work similar to how Olive’s fairy tales are layered with secrets that cannot be spoken out loud. Philip is an outsider, an observer of these two unusual families, the Fludds and the Wellwoods, and the reader experiences his surprise when mysteries are revealed and begin to unravel.

The Children's Book is hard to describe in a short review. For me, the dominate theme is a mother’s love for her child and this is demonstrated with not only Olive but also with her sister, Violet, who is a caregiver for the children. The reader is introduced to many characters right at the beginning and the flow of the novel seems to focus on one or two people, a conversation or a situation and then move on rather quickly to a different experience. As guests arrive at the family estate for the annual midsummer party, the reader is treated to a tantalizing description of plays, marionette shows, feasts and heated political discussion, a perfect forewarning of things to come. Byatt incorporates, in interesting detail, the progressive political beliefs of the Wellwood family and their friends. The Children's Book is a story within a story and is layers upon layers where so much is happening that the reader is afraid to blink her eye for fear of missing something important.

Written by: Su Lin Mangan, December 3rd 2009

Gabriel García Márquez: A Life

admin — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:00:00 +0000

By Gerald Martin

Alfred A. Knopf

In his exhaustively researched biography of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Gerald Martin, who spent seventeen years examining every aspect of Marquez’s life and interviewing over 300 people, beautifully takes the reader through the life and times of one of Latin America’s most influential writers, a Nobel Prize winner, and one of the most popular novelist in the last fifty years.

Martin traces Márquez’s (or “Gabo” as he is affectionately referred to throughout the biography) early beginnings back to Aratacata’s early days and to the life of Colonel Nicholás R. Márquez Mejia, Gabo’s maternal grandfather, who played an influential and supportive role in the young boy’s life until he was swooped up by his nomadic parents at nine years old. It’s during that time, Martin writes, that the inspiration for One Hundred Years of Solitude was born and where Gabo learned of magic via his superstitious grandmother.

Living with his parents, Martin writes of the antagonistic relationship with his philandering father, his secondary school years where writes poetry and is acknowledged as a brilliant young scholar, to his University days as a law student, who has no interest in the law, but in literature.

Martin painstakingly examines Gabo’s career as an investigative journalist, his travels to Europe and later to Mexico, where he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel was published six years later, catapulting Márquez to fame, fortune and friendships with notable leaders of the left including Spain’s Felipe Gonzàlez, France’s François Mitterand, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro—a source of controversy and criticism for the author who has been a lifelong Liberal.

Gabriel García Márquez: A Life is a magical and intoxicating book that is much more than one man’s life story; it is part history, part cultural studies, and part political science. Gerald Martin provides a mesmerizing tribute to an extraordinary writer.

Written by: Rebeca Schiller, June 28th 2009

Unbowed

admin — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 17:39:00 +0000

Wangari Maathai

Alfred A. Knopf

This inspirational memoir traces the life of an extraordinary woman. Wangari Maathai was born in 1940 in a small Kikuyu community in Kenya. Throughout the memoir we watch Maathai’s life change and progress alongside Kenyan society. The memoir unfolds with stories of Kikuyu traditions and beliefs as a young Maathai plants crops alongside her mother. We see the influence that British colonization has on Kenyan society as European practices are adopted and cash crop agriculture replaces native plants. Maathai understands the value of Kenya’s natural habitat and how it must bridge Kenya’s past and future.

Maathai’s life lessons culminate in her founding the Green Belt Movement. The Green Belt Movement and its aim to create a better future for Kenya blends the childhood lessons Maathai learned watching her mother work with the land, the ability to think critically and to ask questions which she gained while attending college in the United States, and the importance of valuing one’s culture that she learned while conducting research for her Ph.D. in Germany. Maathai’s aims in Kenya become increasingly political as she rallies for equal pay and benefits for female professors at the college where she teaches, stands up to the government when it attempts to destroy one of Kenya’s community parks, and stages a year long sit-in with mothers whose sons were political prisoners. Throughout the memoir, Maathai struggles to maintain peace both in Kenya and in her personal life. She withstands a humiliating divorce, multiple arrests and social stigma.

This memoir, much like Maathai herself, honors Kenyan history and tradition while simultaneously planting the seeds of a brighter future for Kenya. Maathai’s perseverance and dedication to noble causes bring her allies both in Kenya and abroad, but it is a long journey before Maathai’s efforts are truly appreciated and honored in Kenya. After all of Maathai’s struggles, there couldn’t be a more beautiful ending to her memoir than to see her joy as she is honored with the Nobel Peace Prize.

Written by: Breanne Reindl, April 19th 2007