A well-researched and provocative analysis offering hope and optimism for our future.
An examination of the effects that the end of consumerism would have on society.
Many politicians insist the economy will collapse if spending slows, while environmentalists warn we cannot sustain our current level of consumption. MacKinnon ponders what would really happen if we stopped shopping. While many of the concepts are familiar, the author digs deeper than most. Rather than allowing his conclusions to be directed by the theories of others, MacKinnon traveled the world, conducting interviews with experts and gathering information to support his findings. Among other places, the author visited Namibia, Ecuador, Finland, and Japan. The proliferation of the global pandemic, which occurred while MacKinnon was writing the book, allowed him to examine, in real time, the effects that changes in consumer spending could have. His conclusions should encourage readers to carefully consider their own habits. Throughout history, consumers have stopped shopping, albeit temporarily, for various reasons, including war and economic recession. Prior to the pandemic, MacKinnon notes, consumer consumption was often driven by impulse buying, vanity, and the desire to keep up with others. While consumerism initially increased at the beginning of the pandemic, as people began hoarding household and food items out of fear of shortages, a shift soon emerged. People continued to shop, but their purchases were more in line with intrinsic values, including spending more time with family and in nature. Rather than spending their money on luxury vacations and cars, consumers chose products such as camping gear, gardening supplies, books, and board games. They also sought out higher-quality and longer-lasting products. As MacKinnon shows, such shifts would likely continue to offer numerous benefits for all, including improved health and a cleaner environment. He cites a “humble goal: to reduce consumption by 5% across the rich world.” That shift, he writes, “might be the end of the world as we know it. It will not be the end of the world.”
A well-researched and provocative analysis offering hope and optimism for our future.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-285602-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
For fans only.
The hoodie-and-shorts-clad Pennsylvania senator blends the political and personal, and often not nicely.
Fetterman’s memoir addresses three major themes. The first—and the one he leads with—is depression and mental illness, which, combined with a stroke and heart trouble, brought him to a standstill and led him to contemplate suicide. The second is his rise to national-level politics from a Rust Belt town; as he writes, he’s carved a path as a contentious player with a populist streak and a dislike for elites. There are affecting moments in his personal reminiscences, especially when he writes of the lives of his working-class neighbors in impoverished southwestern Pennsylvania, its once-prosperous Monongahela River Valley “the most heartbreaking drive in the United States.” It’s the third element that’s problematic, and that’s his in-the-trenches account of daily politics. One frequent complaint is the media, as when he writes of one incident, “I am not the first public figure to get fucked by a reporter, and I won’t be the last. What was eye-opening was the window it gave into how people with disabilities navigate a world that doesn’t give a shit.” He reserves special disdain for his Senate race opponent Mehmet Oz, about whom he wonders, “If I had run against any other candidate…would I have lost? He got beaten by a guy recovering from a stroke.” Perhaps so, and Democratic stalwarts will likely be dismayed at his apparent warmish feelings for Donald Trump and dislike of his own party’s “performative protests.” If Fetterman’s book convinces a troubled soul to seek help, it will have done some good, but it’s hard to imagine that it will make much of an impression in the self-help literature. One wonders, meanwhile, at sentiments such as this: “If men are forced to choose between picking their party or keeping their balls, most men are going to choose their balls.”
For fans only.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593799826
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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