ERA Reviews

The chief virtue of this collection is that it demonstrates the wide range of Babbitt's interests and how those interests traversed many cultures.

Spanish character is the subject of the first essay. Babbitt also taught French and wrote a survey of French literary critics; here that interest is reflected in essays on Pascal, Rousseau, Racine, Diderot, and the correspondence of George Sand and Flaubert. He covers the English tradition by looking at Matthew Arnold and the standards of other English literary critics. He studied and admired Buddhism, having translated Sanskrit and Pali, including Buddha's Dhammapada; this anthology contains two essays on Indian thought.

Finally, he demonstrated a deep interest in ethics and education. Here he scorns the increasingly utilitarian direction of American education, as at Harvard. In its place he argues in favor of the liberal arts tradition and a world view he called American Humanism against the quasi-religious humanitarianism of Dewey.

Babbitt's variety also suggests an imaginative conservatism which has both absorbed the works of the past and added to them. In both shaping and expanding conservatism, Babbitt resembles Russell Kirk. Both were Midwestern conservatives who emphasized imagination and literature, education and the liberal arts, and what came to be called cultural conservatism. They understood economics-and they could see past it. They also cultivated a plain style. Babbitt was obviously a teacher and scholar of the first rank, but his learning never overwhelmed his clear prose.

A book like this is necessarily limited. Because our time is limited as well, I must qualify my recommendation, preferring instead to direct the reader toward Babbitt's more thorough works: Literature and the American College, Democracy and Leadership, and Rousseau and Romanticism; also a book by Milton Hindus called Irving Babbitt, Literature, and the Democratic Culture.

Anyone who is into History will like this cookbook. Many of the recipes don't look appealing but it contains a lot of interesting facts about lifestyles in the 30's.

I had absolutely no idea what to think of this book when I ordered it, as there was no description or information available on it that I could find. I bought it, as I am a huge devotee of the L-1011. I am by profession an airline pilot with type ratings in seven airliners including the L-1011, and consider the 1011 to be the best of the best, certainly the best of the early widebody aircraft. I was hoping for a pilot's perspective when I read this book, but that was just my personal bias. What I found was a work devoted to the management and financial aspects of the program.

That is not to say that it isn't an authoritative or useful book, it just will not be what the typical airliner fan (or pilot for that matter) will be most interested in. There is interesting information on the early contest vs. the DC-10 that is enlightening, but largely the book details financial arrangements at Lockheed.

The reason most people that know airliners love the L-1011 is it's incredible technological achievement (CAT IIIB, DLC, Flying Stabilizer, etc.), but here these are treated as an expensive waste of money. I am not saying Mr. West is wrong in his thinking, per se (the program DID lose money, after all), it is just that he sees the plane as a piece of metal and plastic, that is strictly a utility defined by a profit and loss statement. He does not seem to appreciate the longlasting strides in plane building and safety the TriStar made.

If you are really an L-1011 completist then by all means read it; it is good to have it available, just be aware it is not about the L-1011 itself, and contains no real technical information on the best airliner ever to grace the sky.

An angry, often insightful, and sometimes tirade against the "corporate takeover" of the once-liberal Democratic Party written by a media critic for Fairness and Accuracy in the Media. The author's leftwing bias is clear and upfront as he documents the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council (Senator Leiberman is the current chair - and VP candidate) as the latest chapter in neglect and oppression of poor minorites. Solomon concludes, "to accept the mirage of a humanistic Clinton administration it helps - enormously- to be white and not poor." Written in 1994, this book anticipates the tensions between Clinton and more hardline environmentalists and union activists concerned about the World Trade Organization.

False Hope's harsh, and it is very harsh, critique of the Clinton Administration's origins, motives, and consensus solutions sounds too harsh for my ears. Still, False Hope offers a breezy if depressing read that might be helpful as voters consider whether to promote Gore and Leiberman to the White House. The question remains whether false hope is better than no hope?

In his book The French Worker, Mark Traugott draws on translated autobiographies to paint the reader a picture of the realities of life for workers in France during the 1800s. Their writings tell not only of hardships, but also of the joys experienced in their personal and public lives. It is Traugott's intention that such accounts, when set against the turbulent backdrop of nineteenth century France, will provide the reader with a fascinating insight into how people lived during the French Revolution.

Traugott, who obtained his Ph.D. from Berkeley University currently teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz, specializing in social and economic history, historical sociology and revolutionary and labor history. Traugott does not restrict his research and writing to French history alone. His book Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Action, published in 1995, explores social protest in Great Britain. In Armies of the Poor, Traugott returns to France and investigates the Parisian insurrection of 1848. Whilst Traugott may not be described as a prolific author, it is clear that he is a man who knows and loves history.

It is this in-depth knowledge that enables Traugott to provide us with a glimpse into everyday life in France through the eyes of people engaged in a variety of industries and trades: furniture, textiles, construction, metalwork and clothing. He also provides accounts from the point of view of unskilled laborers and from the world of the domestic servant. Whilst reading these varied accounts, one's eyes are truly opened to both the pleasures and pitfalls of having to earn one's wage during these chaotic times. Though life appeared to be harsh, workers seem to have had a much more concrete sense of camaraderie with their co-workers and with their profession as a whole. Agricol Perdiguier, a joiner, describes these brotherly feelings, "I was pleased to see young men from every part of France living as brothers, helping one another, and offering mutual support" (128). This sense of community within an industry continues throughout his account. Indeed, he appears to receive and give more support to his brothers within the Campagnons than he ever does with respect to his blood family. Where family is concerned, many of the narrators describe a difficult childhood. Jacques Etienne Bédé had a mother who patently did not love him, Suzanne Voilquin lost her mother at an early age, and Norbert Truquin's father abandons him to a life of misery as an assistant to a wool comber. Family relationships appear much less important than the world of word. This skew on allegiances may have been due to the mobile nature of the France's workforce. Leaving home at an early age to embark on a Tour of France would have meant that one spent more time with one's co-workers than with family. Short term employment choices, essential when partaking the Tour, would have also made one dependant on the protection of like minded, but unknown workers upon the way, both to provide employment opportunities and a safe place to stay. Traugott's book amply describes this movement away from filial respect and affection towards attachment to those sharing one's profession.

Whilst The French Worker provides the reader with a rich insight into the lives of those featured, it does have its problems. From a research point of view, the accounts included may well not be representative of the average worker in nineteenth century France since illiteracy and long hours would have made the act of writing a rare pleasure. Therefore, for Traugott's seven to have battled these particular odds and produced autobiographies indicates that they were not of an ilk with, or representative of their kind. In addition, the seven accounts are personal accounts, either written in the form of a journal or completed many years after the events took place. The journal risks portrayal of a knee-jerk reaction to the day or week's events, and the personal account may be self-serving in that it exemplifies the life and loves of the writer. Traugott then had to decide which accounts to include and which to abandon, thus adding the risk of editorial bias. If these problems were not enough, translation then opens the door for possible subjectivity. In Traugott's defense, he does discuss such editorial predicaments in both his Preface and Introductory chapters. Acknowledgement of the dangers by the author shows he is aware of the thin line he walks when producing a book of this type.

The book heaves with footnotes, all essential when digesting a translation of a lifestyle account far removed from one's own. In the Preface and Introduction, Traugott cites other scholars, their works and government documents within these footnotes. However, when one tackles the remainder of The French Worker, the majority of footnote explanations are solely Traugott's. They serve purely as an opportunity to further explain a phrase or action. The book credence would be improved by a wider variety of sources supporting the workers' accounts. The book is logically organized with each account taking the reader a step further through French history. However, for the reader not in possession of an in-depth understanding of this period, this chronological layout could have been enhanced if each account were preceded with a timeline outlining the pertinent historical landmarks.

Traugott manages to provide the reader with a wealth of information, both incidental and core. As a social document, the book is both interesting and informative, but one may have problems in deciding if the lives depicted were actually representative of nineteenth century France. However, given the general lack of documented case histories of the French working classes, perhaps this is the best that one can achieve. Traugott is known for his love of the subject and one can only hope that he is true to that love.

The author has successfully applied an historian's long range perspective to currents fads and trends in health care. His view will save us from the laughter of our grandchildren and perhaps keep us and them from making the same mistakes over and over. This is history that is useful today. History as a prescription for todays ills.

If you're looking for an interesting and fast reading book on the Revolutionary War, you may want to pick up this as a starter. The chapters are short and provide quite a bit of information about the principal characters. I did find, however, two errors of minor consequence. One has John Adams buried in the Garnary Burying Ground in downtown Boston, when it is Sam Adams who is buried there. The other error, I believe, is made when the author quotes Colonel William Prescott as the author of the line, "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes" at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Other sources attribute this line to Israel Putnam, who supposedly was quoting a Prussian prince from 30 years earlier. In any case I found this to be an enjoyable book and I suggest it to anyone who finds this war to be interesting reading.

The fact that you're reading this review can only mean one of two things: 1) you're an upper-classman or graduate student reluctantly forced to read Unger's book; or 2) you're an economist or historian manqué with a deep and unique curiosity about early American finance. I, for one, am the latter.

The essence of Irwin Unger's "The Greenback Era" - the 1965 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history - is that the motivations of the hard and soft money supporters of the post Civil War period are more nuanced than Charles Beard and other leading American historians would have you believe. The author rejects what he calls the duality and economic determinism of the old school. That is, that economic self-interest was the sole motivator in determining how one felt about the federal issue of paper legal tender (the Greenbacks) and that those motivations ultimately split the nation into mutually exclusive groups: East vs. West, debtor vs. creditor, agrarian vs. industrialist. Unger demonstrates that many groups held positions counter to what their economic self-interest would suggest, such as Western farmers whose deep-seated hostility to "rag money" dated back to the Jacksonian Era and held firm even as they suffered the brunt of the credit squeeze during the depression of the 1870s.

The book is well written and quite informative, although a bit anti-climatic (if such a term is appropriate to describe a treatise on post bellum national finance). The book traces the ideological battle between the forces in favor of hard money (resumption to gold) and those in favor of maintaining the Greenbacks from the period immediately following the Civil War to the resumption of the gold standard on 1 January 1879. Unger would have been well-advised to include a concluding chapter that put the debate and its denouement into historical and economic perspective, especially as it related to the Silver question, which in many ways was the robust progeny of the Greenback debate. As it is, "The Greenback Era" just seems to end with the resumption of gold payments with nary a thought or reflection on what it all meant.

The volume is organized by year, beginning with the rise of Christianity, and is arranged chronologically. Includes the Waning of the Ancient World, the Early Middle Ages, the High Middle Ages, the Early Modern Era, and the Modern World to 1990. More than 480 entries. A dictionary of people and places, with special charts and sidebars. Includes full-color picture essays on such topics as the Islamic world, the Renaissance, the rise of totalitarianism, and the scientific revolution.

Bhalla wants to fight. He claims that globalization - far from being the bugaboo imagined by the WTO protestors - has led to a world where incomes are becoming more equally distributed. The conventional wisdom that incomes are diverging rapidly is, Bhalla claims, based on bad numbers and bad number crunching. When the right numbers are crunched properly - here Bhalla says in effect "trust me, I am the only person who knows how to do this right" - we find that incomes are in fact becoming more equally distributed across the world's citizens.

More specifically, Bhalla makes the following points: (1) Income inequality is declining across nations (in large part because of rapid income growth in poor populous nations such as China and India in East and South Asia). (2) Income inequality is rising in many nations. (3) Because inequality across nations is the larger component of total world income inequality, total inequality is declining despite the rise in inequality in the average nation.

Unless you have time to spare, however, I recommend you read The New Geography of Global Income Inequality instead of this book. It's more expensive than the Bhalla book, but it's also a much better book - more focused, better organized, more convincing, and more theoretically informed. In fact, if not for the price of The New Geography, I would recommend it for college courses in globalization and economic development. I would not recommend Bhalla's book for undergraduates. In addition to The New Geography, I also recommend the September 2002 article in the American Economic Review by Bourguignon and Morrisson, "Inequality among world citizens, 1820-1992."