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| TIME TO START THINKING America in the Age of Descent Edward Luce New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, April 2012 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-8021-2021-2 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-8021-2021-0 | 292pp. | HC | $26.00 | |
| Page 8: | Quote from 'Alpha': "People forget that America's military strength is because of our power. It didn't cause it." |
| Huh! I would have guessed that America's military power is because of our strength. |
| Page 10: | "In Asia,America should recognize the inevitable and offer the green light..." |
| Missing space: S/B "Asia, America". |
| Page 12: | "Unlike the fate of the Kennan's 'Long Telegram' from which Kennan developed his piece..." |
| Extra word: S/B "Kennan's". |
| Page 12: | "The authors Y elicited barely a shrug when they volunteered their identities.Yet..." |
| Punctuation: S/B "authors'". |
| Page 12: | "The authors Y elicited barely a shrug when the volunteered their identities.Yet..." |
| Missing space: S/B "identities. Yet". |
| Page 15: | "Today it serves virtually as as a museum of American deindustrialization—the collapse of middle-class neighborhoods and the institutions that came with it." |
| Number error: S/B "them". |
| Page 16: | "At one point half of the world's industrial production took place within a three-hundred-mile radius." |
| Really? What point was that? |
| Page 17: | "For Riegle, however, the sight was visceral." |
| Clumsy: S/B "had a visceral impact". |
| Page 23: | " 'That's when we'll get things done,' Michael Bennett, the senator from Colarado, told me." |
| Spelling: S/B "Colorado". |
| Pages 24-5: | "“the orange bubble.” Outside the bubble, you will not be rewarded for doing your work with free Kettle corn and pancake breakfasts," she said." |
| Extra quotation mark: S/B "bubble. Outside". (Or perhaps there should be another left-double-quotation mark before "Outside".) |
| Page 31: | "According to the Economic Security Index, which tracks the number of Americans who experience a drop in their annual income of at least a quarter, the rate has almost doubled since Reagan was president." |
| Clumsy. I assume it means the income dropped by 25 percent, but the way it's written it could mean a quarter of a year (due to being unemployed for three months), or even twenty-five cents. And the next sentence repeats the clumsiness. |
| Page 31: | "By the time the financial meltdown hit, almost one in five Americans were affected." |
| Number error: S/B "was". |
| Page 66: | "This means that Nucor's employees, many of whom earn more than $100,000 a year, roughly two-thirds of it in profit sharing and team bonuses, will continue to think of ways of squeezing their numbers (or of getting more with the same numbers)." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "Nucor, many of whose employees". |
| Pages 67-8: | "It also reminded me that however 'weightless' America's cloud-based new economy might be the old one on the ground still consumes mountains of metal." |
| Missing comma: S/B "might be, the old one". |
| Page 68: | "We were sitting at Nucor's headquarters in Charlotte, about a five hours' drive south of the Hertford mill..." |
| Extra word or missing hypher/extra letter: S/B "about a five-hour drive" or "about five hours' drive". |
| Page 71: | "Fortunately Kamen, who is one of America's foremost inventors, and probably its wealthiest..." |
| Dean Kamen is wealthy, certainly, and deservedly so. But the author's qualification is justified since Kamen doesn't (AFAIK) disclose his net worth. Even so, I much misdoubt Kamen's wealth surpasses that of Bill Gates, or Paul Allen, or Craig Venter (to name just three wealthy American inventors.) |
| Page 79: | "When we landed, Kamen alighted the plane clutching a remote control." |
| Missing word (or a Britishism?): S/B "alighted from the plane". |
| Page 84: | "...the movie's audiences whelped with joy when a name was called..." |
| I hope the theater always had a corps of midwives standing by. But seriously, wrong word: S/B "yelped". |
| Page 89: | " 'We are forty years into this and we still don't know what we can do with technology in the classroom,' said Kirst. 'Do they use classroom iPads in Finland [the country that tops the rankings]? Could we aspire in California any time in the near future to have Finland's education budgets?' The answer is no." |
| This probably is intended to answer the latter question, but it's not clear: S/B "The answer to Kirst's last question is no". |
| Pages 89-90: | "Health care provides Michigan with by far the largest (and largest growing) source of new jobs..." |
| Word choice: S/B "(and fastest growing)". |
| Page 93: | "Employers complain of a poor work ethic. What this means in practice is that they often talk on their cell phones, turn up with a hangover, argue with coworkers..." |
| Word choice: S/B "is that employees". |
| Page 95: | "As is so often the case, America has a wealth of impressive early-learning projects that never appear to 'scale up.' " |
| It's not clear what this means in the context of its paragraph. Does it mean "work with older children" or the more usual "work with larger numbers"? If the latter, that's probably because the funding to expand those projects never was allocated. |
| Page 96: | "DeVelbiss, about whom I had a strong hunch would succeed in his next start-up..." |
| Extra word: S/B "whom I had a strong hunch would succeed". |
| Page 99: | "Some of them hang around at home, not knowing what to do with their lives. They still found it hard to believe..." |
| Verb tense: S/B "find". |
| Page 103 (FN): | "Having the best universities is not on its own enough to stop decline if so many of its brightest graduates go home." |
| Number error: S/B "so many of their brightest". |
| Page 120: | "Another nearby colleague investigated standing wave tubes." |
| Terminology: S/B "traveling-wave tubes". I'm pretty sure that's what was meant, since Google gives few exact hits for "standing wave tube." The term "traveling-wave tube," on the other hand, returns about 992,000. Related to the klystron, the TWT is used in communications satellites to amplify RF signals, including television. |
| Page 127: | "IBM, which is credited with inventing the computer ..." |
| Fact error: S/B "commercializing the computer". It's now generally agreed that Professor John Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry built the world's first electronic-digital computer at Iowa State University between 1939 and 1942. |
| Page 135: | "Having flown in from Washington, it all sounded very familiar to me." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "I found it all very familiar". |
| Page 140: | "A huge proportion of today's most critical technologies were born at DARPA, among them the global positioning system, the Internet, stealth technology, and the computer mouse." |
| While trackballs, closely related devices for controlling computers, were developed at military laboratories in Britain (1946) and Canada (1952), the first computer mouse was invented by Douglas Englebart at Stanford Research Institute in 1963. |
| Page 142: | "Instead, the vast project, which aims to answer some of the biggest questions in physics,is run from Geneva by the Europeans." |
| This makes it sound as if the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was completed in Texas, but funded and controlled by the Europeans. That is misleading. The SSC was indeed canceled in 1993, leaving it half-completed near Waxahachie, TX. However, its replacement was not begun until 1998 and completed ten years later at CERN in Switzerland. This is the Large Hadron Collider. After several repairs and upgrades, the LHC is now shut down for work to raise its beam energies to 6.5 TEV. The SSC would have operated at beam energies of 20 TEV. |
| Page 148: | "In spite of his rhetoric, Reagan left government larger than he found it. He managed to shut down only four programs—general revenue sharing, urban development action grants, the synthetic fuels program, and the Clinch River Breeder Reactor." |
| Again this mis-reports history. President Carter, alarmed at Clinch River's cost overruns and concerned about the chance of plutonium proliferation, sought to shut it down in 1977. But Congress overrode his veto, and in 1979 the House Science and Technology Committee voted to continue the project. However, after Reagan's election he became Clinch River's champion over growing opposition in Congress. The Senate finally terminated the project on October 26, 1983, voting 56-40 to deny it any further funds. |
| Page 177: | "...Price then treated his guests to a description of the committee system, his area of specialism as a scholar..." |
| Geez -- it's okay. |
| Page 182: | "Then there is media." |
| Number error: S/B "there are the". |
| Page 193: | "Rom's millenarian forebodings were..." |
| This word is okay — and not to be confused with "millennialism" which does require two "l"s and two "n"s. |
| Page 209: | "A student and connoisseur of literature, Mandebach's office walls are stacked with rare items..." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "Mandabach has his office walls". |
| Page 215: | "The moment he launched his bid on February 10, 2007—from the same steps in Springfield, Illinois that Abraham Lincoln had started his own journey 148 years earlier..." |
| Word choice: S/B "the same steps in Springfield, Illinois where Abraham Lincoln had started". |
| Page 218: | "But it meant his campaign finance doublespeak was treated far more deferentially than it should have." |
| Missing word: S/B "than it should have been". |
| Page 229: | "...people with 'preexisting conditions,' such as a diabetics, or people with heart conditions." |
| Extra word: S/B "diabetics". |
| Page 242: | "Obama would not be Obama without a grassroots." |
| Missing word: S/B "a grassroots movement". |
| Page 246: | "...the be-cardiganed president warned his fellow Americans that their country was gripped in a vice of potential decline." |
| Word choice: S/B "vise". |
| Page 253: | "As the last of the West's hegemons following half a millennium of world domination, America's actions will largely answer..." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "America". |
| Page 256: | "Had anyone at the turn of the century forecast that the United States would lose it triple A rating..." |
| Punctuation: S/B "would lose its triple-A". |
| Page 258: | "As a former managing director of both Lehman Brothers and Blackstone, you would be hard-pressed to find a better sample of the type of policy maker who espoused America's worldview in the 1990s." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "Garten would be hard to surpass as". |
| Page 258: | "These were the vanguard of the Washington consensus that handed out free copies of its manual on how to achieve wealth, freedom, universal admiration, The Simpsons, and pareto optimal efficiency..." |
| Capitalization: S/B "Pareto". |
| Page 261: | "Since 1995, the proportion of CEOs who were forced out of their jobs has risen sharply to 35 percent, according to Booz Hamilton." |
| Missing name: S/B "Booz Allen Hamilton". |
| Page 262: | "Even if green detergents were less useless, I doubt they would be paying more for them." |
| Are green detergents useless? I doubt that all of them are. |
| Page 263: | "But that may give too much credit to the actions of the Clinton administration..." |
| The Clinton administration is not mentioned in the previous sentence, nor for a good number of preceding paragraphs. |
| Page 263: | "It came close to capturing the intellectual consensus among economists of all stripes, even if its contents was instantly rejected by the Republican Party." |
| Number error: S/B "its contents were". |
| Page 271: | "It was replaced for most of 2011 with a rowdy debate over the fiscal deficit, a subject on which, bizarrely, Obama acquiesced with his opponents..." |
| Usage: S/B "acquiesced to". |
| Page 274: | "More to the point, America's challenges merit something better than a journalistic manifesto. It requires new ideas." |
| Number error: S/B "they require". |
| Page 275: | "As time went on, and as the subliminal worked on our minds..." |
| Missing noun: S/B "the subliminal attitudes/perceptions". |
| Page 275: | "Unlike our neighborhood, which is in one of Washington's leafier urban spots, the Freemans live in a community that is suffering from creeping rust in its soul." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "the Freemans' community suffers". |
| Page 275: | "Once a bastion of solid middle-class living, the home-foreclosure crisis has spread gradually across their neighborhood." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "their neighborhood has gradually succumbed to the home-foreclosure crisis". |
| Page 279: | "Now empty, they found a bullet hole in its front door." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "it has". |
| Page 280: | "...most of the wrong trends had almost been steepening." |
| Extra word: S/B "had been". |
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.