The prolific Asimov cuts another notch in his smoking keyboard by collaborating with space-specialist White—this time to summarize ten millennia of human expansion and achievements and add a few worn words of wisdom for the difficult times ahead. Considering the scope of their project, which looks both ways at the problematic course of human progress, the authors have their work cut out for them, but they manage to hack and hew the past into a rough shape, encompassing the birth of civilization together with some of its subsequent highs and lows. For the early millennia the focus falls on the Middle East, with some slight attention given to developments in China and the Indian subcontinent. This pattern, once established, remains constant until recent changes in Europe and North America enter the picture in the current millennium; contributions from Africa—with the exceptions of Egypt and ancient Carthage—and South America are almost completely ignored, giving the historical outline a distinct ethnocentric bias. Advancements in agriculture, commerce, writing, and technology are duly noted, but the dominant features at every turn are the innumerable paths of conquest throughout recorded history, from 3000 B.C. to modern times. The effort to demonstrate the futility of empire-building and the persistent citation of population figures provide links to a scenario for the future, in which a decline in birth rates, pursuit of renewable energy resources, and the choice of world trade over world war are viewed as essential for survival of our species—at least until colonization of the solar system becomes possible as a means for humanity to find more breathing room. The familiar "greatest hits" approach to history, with little that's new for the frontiers of the future either. Painless and pointless, to the extent that even Asimov fans should have second thoughts.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1990
ISBN: 0802773915
Page Count: -
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1990
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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