The latest on nature versus nurture may unsettle readers at the extremes but will entertain them all.
Figuring out who we are—and who we will become.
Belief in the superiority of people like you can be deeply satisfying. Nazism gave that a bad reputation, but it revived with the 1994 bestseller The Bell Curve, whose authors maintained that people achieve if they inherit abilities that nonachievers and minorities lack. Princeton University professor Conley, author of You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist, delivers a compelling update on the steady stream of books that have disproved The Bell Curve’s science, although its thesis remains popular. Philosophers for millennia have maintained that humans are born a blank slate—devoid of knowledge—so everything we know comes from experience: nurture. Charles Darwin complicated matters by contending that natural selection fixed many traits at birth. It’s complicated; readers must pay attention as the author, a “biosociologist” who measures people’s genes as well as their environment, explains concepts such as a polygenic index and passive gene-environmental correlation, but the rewards are substantial. “Today,” Conley writes, “we can predict a US child’s (or embryo’s) adult height, how far he or she will go in school, and whether that child will be overweight as an adult—all from a cheek swab, finger prick, or vial of saliva.” As usual, common sense is wrong. Few doubt that parents exert the dominant influence on how children turn out. Genetic analysis reduces this to 10% or less. Bachelor’s degree holders, over a lifetime, earn $1.5 million more than high school graduates and live 6 to 10 years longer. But they also come from wealthier families with more two-parent households and more educated parents. “Blank-slaters won’t like the fact that even the effects of the environment are partly driven by genes. Hereditarians, on the other hand, won’t appreciate that genes aren’t deterministic but part of a messy social process.” Your environment affects how your genes play out.
The latest on nature versus nurture may unsettle readers at the extremes but will entertain them all.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781324092636
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 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.
