In the hands of this talented writer and thinker, this potentially dry material becomes an engaging intellectual adventure,...
A provocative explanation for the evolution and divergence of ethical values.
Humans are genetically hard-wired to respect certain universal core ethical concerns, and yet there have been "enormous differences through time and space in what humans have taken fairness [and] justice to mean,” notes prolific academic Morris (Classics/Stanford Univ.; War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots, 2014, etc.). The author contends that a culture's interpretation of these concepts is driven by what works best for the form of energy capture on which the culture is based. That is, "our choices about what to be righteous about are...forced on us by the ways we extract energy from the world." Cheerfully admitting that his argument is reductionist, materialist, universalist, functionalist and evolutionist, Morris sorts cultures from the end of the last ice age to the present into foragers, farmers and fossil fuel users. Each of these groups captures more energy per capita than its predecessor; each is also more materially successful and so tends to displace its predecessor over time. Each group's interpretations of ethical concepts are reflected, among other things, in a culture's attitudes toward political inequality, including kingship and slavery, wealth and gender inequality, and toleration of violence. Morris concludes with some speculation about the future of ethical development as humanity's per capita capture of energy continues its hockey-stick rise into the next century. This is, in book form, the author's 2012 Tanner Lectures for Princeton's Center for Human Values, and like the lectures, it includes brief reactions and rebuttal by three academics and the novelist Margaret Atwood, concluding with an author's response in a chapter puckishly titled, "My Correct Views on Everything."
In the hands of this talented writer and thinker, this potentially dry material becomes an engaging intellectual adventure, fully accessible to the generalist, as it ranges across millennia and disciplines including classical history, sociology, and moral and political philosophy.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-691-16039-9
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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