An informed, thought-provoking consideration of the relational dimensions of our lives.
How our interactions with others make us who we are.
Lowery, a social psychologist and Stanford professor, explores how our selfhood is not a stable entity under our own firm control but rather a product of the social worlds we inhabit. “Our self is a construction of relationships and interactions,” he writes, “constrained and yet in search of the feeling of freedom.” Lowery synthesizes a range of scientific research in making his case while punctuating specific claims with examples drawn from ancient and modern literary sources ranging from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. The author investigates many commonly held assumptions that selfhood is, for the most part, a privately malleable entity originating within us at birth and that absolute liberty in defining it might be both possible and desirable. We know ourselves better and can improve our chances at self-improvement, the author explains convincingly, if we accept that our identities are fluid, socially determined phenomena. Though such arguments are by no means new, and some of the summaries of others’ complex explanations of selfhood may seem a little reductive, the book offers an accessible and absorbing account of the relational dimensions of our reflective being. A particularly rich chapter is dedicated to the relevance of a relational selfhood to race, which has routinely been understood according to fixed or “essentialist” categories. Ultimately, Lowery’s advice about the wisdom of accepting one’s dependence on others, and of fulfilling one’s moral obligations to a community of interconnected selves, is well founded. “To describe or define your best self is to accept limits, constraints on what you are,” he writes. “In this context, constraint should be a source of comfort, more a hug than a straitjacket.”
An informed, thought-provoking consideration of the relational dimensions of our lives.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780062913005
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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