Economic-union Books

The title refers to two illusions that the authors claim are embedded in America's "public culture." One illusion is the notion that people and nations are generally well-intentioned and fair-minded, so that conflicts must result from misunderstanding. The other is that all economic and political systems are converging on Western-style capitalist democracy. Certainly some Americans believe these things, but are these beliefs as pervasive and strongly held as the authors claim? Central to the book is the claim that these illusions have the American mind in a tight grip. Are the authors right? You don't need to read the book to judge for yourself. If you think (as I do) that the authors have oversimplified American attitudes, one major thesis of their book collapses. There is a deeper problem with the book. The authors claim to see the world clearly, without illusion. Yet never, ever, do they display any uncertainty (or sense of humor) about anything. The future, especially the long-term future, is too uncertain for anyone to have confidence about how things will play out. The authors do not seem to recognize any possibility they could be wrong--for example, about the permanent superiority of the US economic system. Yet their own table on page 176 (intended to show the inferiority of Soviet economic performance) shows that Japan did better than the US in growth of per capita GDP for 1973-2001, and West Europe did just as well. Who knows what the statistics for 2002-2030 will show? Furthermore, they have tunnel vision: they see only threats of a military or quasi-military nature. Their four key threats are (1) terrorism, (2) Russia, (3) China and (4) Europe. To meet those threats they espouse a concept of "strategic independence." They are overconfident about the ability of the US to cope with such threats all by itself. Never, ever, do they see a need for a Plan "B." And it does not seem to occur to them that other sorts of threats might turn out to be more important. They are blind to the possible necessity of long-term allies and treaties to face non-military threats. For example, a pandemic may well kill far more Americans in the next fifty years than terrorists armed with a few nukes could possibly kill. Dealing with possible pandemics requires good international cooperation (as does dealing with terrorism). Pandemics are just one example; any reader can easily imagine other such examples. Finally, people who claim to be free of illusions had better get their facts right. The authors often get facts wrong. For example, they claim that unemployment in the US "is lower than in any of the other developed great powers." (p 138) According to the CIA Factbook, unemployment in the US in 2006 was 4.8%, whereas in Japan it was 4.1%. They show faulty judgment on other issues. On page 289 they take seriously the idea that Saddam had WMDs just before the war but moved them to Syria. This is of course theoretically possible; it's also theoretically possible that Dick Cheney machinated the US into war with Iraq so as to enrich Halliburton. Only committed ideologues would entertain either theory. I could give more examples of the authors' errors and misjudgments, but this review is already too long. The book does set forth provocative opinions that are worth thinking about, some of which might turn out to be right, which is why I give it more than one star.

Based both on its title and on the fact that this book is a publication of the American Folklore Society, I expected to find a collection of first-person reminiscences, perhaps embellished as all effective stories are embellished by their tellers, though retaining basic truths, painting a verbal picture of the daily lives of the men who worked as uniformed porters in the expensive sleeping cars owned by the Pullman Company. As an identifiable group, Pullman porters were as much a fixture of American railroads as were Harvey Girls on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe lines, and both groups were in a position to acquire limitless experiences relating to the traveling public. The porters interacted not only with one another and with other members of train crews, notably conductors, but also with thousands of travelers. Surely, serving in such a position engendered countless stories of intriguing human interaction as well as unpublished tales of railroad operations.

Alas, those limitless, countless stories may indeed have been lost to history. At least, they were lost to the author of this book. Santino has not written a book of folklore at all but rather a treatise on the sociology of the group. He has also stirred in copious condemnation of the Pullman Company for its racist employment practices, a heaping of hero worship for A. Philip Randolph, founder of the porters' union, and a propensity for blaming all the ills of corporate society on the aftereffects of slavery.

For instance, the practice of tipping, which augmented the porters' actual salaries, Santino relates to the buying and selling of slaves, identifying it as a demeaning and insulting practice. How he might explain the tipping of caucasian service workers in restaurant and tonsorial occupations, inasmuch as none of their ancestors were ever sold as slaves, remains a conundrum. He points out the rabid opposition of the Pullman Company to the formation of a porters' union, but he ignores the equally strong opposition of companies of that era to the formation of any union, even one totally caucasian in makeup. White unionists were beaten, branded as "bolsheviks," and run out of the county without regard to their race, and his book does not relate any intimidation of black unionists that exceeded that exerted against white labor organizers.

Santino even equates the fact that porters were expected to smile and be subserviently gracious to their customers as a holdover from slave days. I am under the distinct impression that any professional employee--caucasian, black, oriental, whatever--in a service industry considers respectful pleasantry to customers as part of the job for which they are being paid.

Despite the fact that this book contains all of two or three, or, if we stretch, four folklore stories in it, one of which, the blank check from the Pullman Company to A. Philip Randolph, is repeated continually, it does have some good historical information in it. The formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was indeed a noteworthy accomplishment in the story of the American labor movement. The fact that porters were uniformly called "George" by the passengers of the day is an interesting bit of trivia about railroad culture (though whether the use of that name really smacks of slaves who often took the names of their owners, as in George Pullman, may be questionable). That men closely associated with the porters' union played pivotal roles in both the Montgomery bus boycott following Rosa Parks' arrest and in the March on Washington that brought Martin Luther King into the public eye are facts that had previously escaped my attention.

I did find value in Santino's discussion of the formation of the union and perhaps in its contribution to the historical record of an occupational group that was once well known in the United States and which certainly contributed to the development of its culture and economy. Unfortunately, any folkloric history of the Pullman porter is yet to be written. Santino's book is generally worth reading if one can find it on a library shelf; whether it deserves to be purchased and given a permanent spot on the reader's bookshelf may be another matter.

Having read this work twice now, I am still unclear as to why it was published.

The book contains a densely written, almost incomprehensible introduction in which the author attempts to place his work within a larger Marxist theoretical framework. Kudos for attempting to do that, but I don't see how any of that is accomplished in this rather mundane work.

One of the major problems is that almost all the references are to second-hand scholarly histories rather than primary sources. Essentially, Vittoz is merely re-interpreting the work of others, which is neither persuasive nor effective. Rather, it makes the book come off as a Ph.D. literature review/historical overview rather than as a true piece of original scholarship.

A second major problems is the near complete lack of new insight. I am an inveterate reader of end-notes. By the time I was halfway through this book, I wanted to read the sources that Vittoz was citing rather Vittoz' book. Vittoz didn't seem to add anything new, and didn't seem to be re-interpreting existing scholarly or historical work in any way. It seems to me to be a cheap sort of scholarship.

A third major problem with the work is that I found it missed important historical aspects of the topic under study. Having read Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s "The Coming of the New Deal" and even Charles Morris' "The Blue Eagle At Work" (which hardly purports to be a historical or legislative overview of New Deal labor policy), I found Vittoz' book to be superficial. Although nearly every industry developed a Blue Eagle labor code, for example -- including such major industries as steel, construction and the maritime trades -- Vittoz ignores these in favor of a focus on a very few, non-representative industry (such as cotton and textiles). Why? I can only conclude that it's because there is a lot of published work on these industries.

But why read Vittoz's re-hash when I can read the works of authors such as Irving Bernstein, Kurt Braun, Jesse Carpenter, Melvyn Dubofsky, Walter Galenson, Sidney Fine and Waldo Fisher (just to name a few)?

I was terribly unimpressed with this book, and suggest that readers look to better authors who rely more heavily on primary-source material and provide a much more detailed look at New Deal labor policy that this book.

Truthfully, I do not know much about international economics, but after reading this book I know quite little more. It is not meant for the educated public (say someone with a doctorate in Psychology from Harvard.) It is written in that dreadful abstract and ultimately unclear social science jargon particular to each discipline's professional publications. What ever happened to good old clear, straight down-to-earth American prose ? I give the book two stars because it does seem to have a few interesting ideas, but I cannot go higher because in light of the prose the thoughts must be glimpsed as through a glass darkly.

Beware buyers! I purchased this book under the impression it was a new account, it is in fact not. The book was published a few years ago under a different title, I think it was" The Lost Fortune of the Tsars". This new book adds litttle to the account and seems to be a mere reprint of the earlier book. Dear reader correct me if I am wrong in this matter.

This book should really get a new title. It does not explain or have any relation with hide and seek. It covers the history of the secret police in bad prose and a random structure. This was simply a dissertation put into book form with no regard for readership. The information is valuable if you are looking for a straightforward and statistical analysis of the relevant achieves as to the structure of the Russian secret police. It does not include very many stories and the ones it does include are not explained very well. Overall I was very disappointed with this book and I have to believe there are better resources out there. If you are writing a research paper on this subject than it cannot be beat but otherwise don't waste your time. I really can't believe someone could make this subject boring.

Readers looking for insights into the post-communist situation will be disappointed by this lackluster, sterile treatment.

I understand that Marshall Goldman is/was an esteemed economist at Harvard. To be fair, it is easy to look back on his book (last updated soon after the August 1991 coup) with critical hindsight. However, it has been claimed in the main review that this book was "prescient". So it seems reasonable to point out that Goldman got a lot wrong. His repeated emphasis on the need for early and rapid privatisation (by which I mean selling off state enterprises) as a key part of successful economic reform, for starters. Goldman's economic diagnosis and prescribed cure are merely a mapping of received ideas about economics onto a country without paying much attention to how those prescriptions would actually take effect in this particular situation. "Privatisation is good, it says so in this textbook, so Gorbachev needs to privatise everything now. Inflation is bad, so Gorbachev needs to stop printing money." etc. etc. We now know what effect this kind of thinking has had on the people of the former Soviet Union. But what really bothers me about this book is that it contains factual inaccuracies, which I'm sure were just typos but should have been weeded out. The transliteration of Russian words is erratic to say the least, which leads me to suspect that Goldman's knowledge of Russian was close to non-existent at the time (but hey, who needs to know the language of a country before you start drawing up recipes for its reform?). And finally, it's just plain badly written.

I've never read such a boring book! It takes ages before you start understanding what this guy is actually saying. After reading a few pages you'll be fast asleep... At least I did.

This book is seasoned economists only... It IS badly written, the theory is unnecessarily complicated, but then again it was certainly not intended to be an elegant political essay. If you want to know about the scientific depths of economic integration between nations, this is the right reading for you. But be prepared to take a lot of aspirin.

This is a total contrast to american books. It is without colors, pictures. You can hardly find a graph in it. Besides this, that the book is not interesting to look at and it is also written in a totaly ununderstandable way. It wants to be sophisticated, but it is a crap! I would not recomend this book to anyone who does not really need it.

Normally I don't have problems reading the texts schools use but this one is the worst book I've ever had to read. My instructor provided outlines of each chapter that were provided by the author. Without those I would not have been able to make heads or tails of this book.The author needs to ake this book less dry and more learning friendly.

Sometimes books can't help but to cover dry material. This book does not excell past being extremely dry. The book is well documented, thorough, and comprehensive. The eight edition is aesthically pleasing, but still does not seem to achieve the ability to make itself an easy read. I would highly recommend another book for this study, or using this one as background information for study.

My teacher assigned this book for my Labor Relations course and I wish he picked out a better book. The definitions are awful and you have to read them like 3 times until you fully understand what information the book is trying to provide. There was one part that really made me think that this book was thrown together in a couple of minutes. One sentence in this book stated that, "Southwest airlines was not unionized." My aviation management teacher saw something wrong with this statement because Southwest is heavily unionized. I think the author had a particular issue in his life and was trying to smurf it off in his book. This book is definately not for beginning students, unless you have time to decifer what the author is trying to say..... I could talk more about how terrible this book is, but I think you get the point
P.S. There were some really bad run on sentences in this book