A well-written, yet oversimplified, history of human progress over the past half-millennium.
Carlson ruminates on the role of progress in human history in this debut nonfiction book.
“I am a progressive,” the author declares in the opening lines of this book. While endorsing a plethora of 21st-century progressive causes—from raising the minimum wage and corporate tax rates to advocating for reproductive rights and gun control—Carlson is careful to clarify that progressivism extends beyond one’s views on public policy to an overarching “moral obligation to participate in our world’s progress.” Focusing his attention on human history, the author emphasizes what he calls “the reality of progress,” noting that progress is “the general trend, not just of human history, but of cosmic history.” Acknowledging that progress is rife with setbacks and is a slow process, Carlson breezes through thousands of years of human history in the book’s first chapter before taking readers to “The Birth of Progress” with the Scientific Revolution. Isaac Newton, Galileo, and other paradigm-shifting scientists challenged the cultural and religious status quo, providing the foundations upon which the subsequent Enlightenment would be built. Once the medieval scientific model was effectively overturned, the author asserts, it was only a matter of time before men such as John Locke and Thomas Jefferson sought to replace the feudal model of governance (which was based on the supposed natural order of a universe that Newtonian physics had upended). Progress, per Carlson’s narrative history, continued to advance into the 19th and early 20th centuries: The Civil War marked the end of slavery in the United States, suffragist movements united women across the globe, Christian scholars embraced more critical approaches to biblical analysis, and Darwinian evolution offered alternative explanations for the origins of life. By the 20th century, Martin Luther King Jr. was expanding the limited visions of Locke and Jefferson to their natural conclusions, arguing for a moral universalism that transcended race and ethnicity.
Book one in an anticipated three-volume work on progressivism, this installment’s concluding chapter on the 21st century—from the progressive hopes embodied in Barack Obama’s presidency to the backlash embodied in Donald Trump’s—sets the stage for the series’ next two books, which will focus more on the present and future than the past. With a doctorate in philosophy from Penn State, Carlson has a firm command of the major philosophical and ethical transformations that have defined Western history from the Scientific Revolution to the present, and he writes with a clear and accessible style. African, Indigenous, and Asian perspectives are largely excluded, however, while China, a nation rich in history and philosophy, is only mentioned once in the almost 500-page tome, and then only in reference to those killed under its communist regime. Problematically, this is not the history of a global “progressive worldview” but a history of the West that highlights the ways in which Western thinkers and revolutionaries (including Black Americans like King) have shaped global history. Though critical of Aristotle, the author ironically embraces a teleological view of history that sees a “fundamental trajectory” of history “moving forward and upward.” Contemporary historians, who have by and large rejected teleological narratives as reductive and exclusionary, may also chafe at the book’s lack of citations and engagement with historiographic literature.
A well-written, yet oversimplified, history of human progress over the past half-millennium.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9798989372720
Page Count: 476
Publisher: PWV Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
