An astute examination of loneliness and isolation that sheds light, finds humor, and provides hope.
A cultural anthropologist offers his take on America’s self-reliant culture.
According to Richardson, some key traits lodged in the American ethos, such as self-reliance and maintaining privacy, seem positive but have contributed to increasing widespread isolation; trauma lessens when burdens are shared as a group, but too often Americans are expected to find their own solutions. Sally, a participant in the author’s study, is a nurse mourning the tragic death of her sister. (Richardson uses research gleaned from a sampling of older Americans aged 45-74.) Her co-workers ignored Sally’s unhappiness until her volatile emotions began to affect her job performance. By comparison, Richardson’s adopted South Indian community (he spent time in the region conducting fieldwork as a student) gave immediate “comfort and censure” to a man who had developed a drinking problem, seeing his issue as the group’s responsibility. Family ties in modern America are weak and distant compared to earlier time periods and other cultures, the author asserts. Canada’s Nêhiyawak people have 17 terms related to varieties of cousins; in the U.S., most people have little contact with any cousins at all. Richardson observes that even minor-seeming issues, such as the ways we eat and have fun, contribute to societal disconnection. With abundant specialized diets (e.g., gluten-free or vegan) available to them and unlimited access to snacks, family members and friends often eat separately rather than sharing meal times. Recreation is a healthy respite from work, but the idea of fun has shifted—rather than involving social interactions, amusement now often falls to streaming platforms like Netflix, viewed alone. Richardson effectively uses humor and personal anecdotes—his dad becomes an ongoing joke—and the book’s charts and graphs are mostly easy to read. The author’s message that we need more collectivism to be healthy again is daunting for an individualistic society, but Richardson also provides glimmers of hope; for example, Gen Z seems to be a more collaborative generation than its predecessors, and Americans are seeking mental health treatment more often.
An astute examination of loneliness and isolation that sheds light, finds humor, and provides hope.Pub Date: May 17, 2024
ISBN: 9798988768005
Page Count: 434
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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