A sharp demand to disenthrall ourselves, to instead face the future with “practical skill and something like common sense.”
With the era of cheap energy and easy credit now over, novelist and social critic Kunstler (The Witch of Hebron, 2010, etc.) delivers a cold slap to the fantasists who believe technology will save us.
Seven years after his much-discussed jeremiad The Long Emergency, the author returns to recount the evidence supporting his predictions about our radically altered future. The still-unfolding financial crisis kicked off in 2008, exploding populations, climate change (anthropocentric or not), peak oil, and the inadequacy of alternative methods to power societies are all cited as signs we’ve entered the zone where our customs and habits must change so as to avoid a complete breakdown. The dangerously stressed systems that underpin the society we’ve known since World War II—“agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, transport, finance, the oil-gas-coal industry, the electric grid”—are too large, too complex and too expensive to sustain any longer. Followers of Kunstler’s writings and attendees of his many lecture appearances will recognize the take-no-prisoners style, the harsh invective directed at familiar targets—cars, planes, skyscrapers, Wall Street, suburbia—and the pleas on behalf of walkable cities, trains and farms built to human scale. The added feature here is the scorn he directs at those who refuse to recognize the severity and dimensions of the crisis he describes. He trashes the “delusional groupthink” of Google executives who confuse energy with technology; he abuses industry leaders who promote so-called “clean” coal, shale oil and gas to extend our fossil fuel addiction; he chides self-described “greens” for wildly overestimating the readiness of alternatives or renewables to fill the breach; he lambastes both political parties for their irrelevance; and he berates futurists like Ray Kurzweil for their “techno-grandiosity,” for magical thinking, and for their steadfast refusal to accept that something that can’t go on forever won’t.
A sharp demand to disenthrall ourselves, to instead face the future with “practical skill and something like common sense.”Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2030-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
Satirical, raw, and unapologetically real, West delivers the bittersweet truths on contemporary living.
A cornucopia of shrewd cultural observations from New York Times columnist West (Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman, 2016).
In 18 pointed essays, the author addresses a variety of topics, including frivolous internet sensation Grumpy Cat, South Park, Guy Fieri, and the global significance of abortion rights and gender equality. In West’s opening tirade, she denounces Donald Trump’s repetitive usage of the term “witch hunt” while scrutinizing his uncanny “ability to conjure reality out of hot air and spittle.” This essay serves as the launching pad for further pieces exposing the sorry state of contemporary American politics and popular culture. Tough, irritated, and eager to speak her truth, the author expounds on the unifying aspects of visibility and activism to cultivate change, especially when countering the denigration of women. Her sharp wit and no-nonsense sense of humor also shine through her dissection of the work of Adam Sandler, Gwyneth Paltrow’s diet plan (her avocado smoothie “could give diarrhea an existential crisis”), and how movies like Clue shaped her perspectives and appreciation for one-liners and physical comedy. West rarely minces words, especially regarding documentaries on the Ted Bundy murders and the Fyre Festival or when expressing her sheer appreciation for the legacy of Joan Rivers, and her writing is fluid and multifaceted. Though she often rages at social injustice, she also becomes solemnly poetic when discussing her fondness for the drizzly Pacific Northwest, where she was raised and still resides, a place where she can still feel her deceased father’s presence “in the ridges and grooves of my city—we are close, superimposed, separated only by time, and what’s that? This is the only religion I can relate to.” Only occasionally are the smoothly written essays hijacked by intrusive asides—e.g., her experience inside a proselytizing Uber driver’s car, a scene wedged into her reflections on climate change. Though uneven at times, the author drives home the critical issues of our time while taking time to tickle our funny bones.
Satirical, raw, and unapologetically real, West delivers the bittersweet truths on contemporary living.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-44988-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
An intriguing examination of the complexity of female power in a variety of relationships.
A collection of personal journal entries from the feminist writer that explores power dynamics and “a subject [she] kept coming back to: women strong in public, weak in private.”
Cultural critic and essayist Roiphe (Cultural Reporting and Criticism/New York Univ.; The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, 2016, etc.), perhaps best known for the views she expressed on victimization in The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism (1994), is used to being at the center of controversy. In her latest work, the author uses her personal journals to examine the contradictions that often exist between the public and private lives of women, including her own. At first, the fragmented notebook entries seem overly scattered, but they soon evolve into a cohesive analysis of the complex power dynamics facing women on a daily basis. As Roiphe shares details from her own life, she weaves in quotes from the writings of other seemingly powerful female writers who had similar experiences, including Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, and Hillary Clinton. In one entry, Roiphe theorizes that her early published writings were an attempt to “control and tame the narrative,” further explaining that she has “so long and so passionately resisted the victim role” because she does not view herself as “purely a victim” and not “purely powerless.” However, she adds, that does not mean she “was not facing a man who was twisting or distorting his power; it does not mean that the wrongness, the overwhelmed feeling was not there.” Throughout the book, the author probes the question of why women so often subjugate their power in their private lives, but she never quite finds a satisfying answer. The final entry, however, answers the question of why she chose to share these personal journal entries with the public: “To be so exposed feels dangerous, but having done it, I also feel free.”
An intriguing examination of the complexity of female power in a variety of relationships.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2801-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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