A profound vision of post-humanistic ethics.
Purdy (Law/Duke Univ.; A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom, 2009, etc.) examines the growing awareness of the relationship between humans and other species, which could create “a Copernican revolution in ethical imagination.”
Adopting a historical perspective, the author suggests that such evils of the past as “imperialism, racism, and gender hierarchy all came from the same arrogance as human subjection of the living world.” But Purdy also recognizes that environmentalists have been guilty of misanthropy “braided together with bigotry, narrowness, obtuse privilege and nostalgia.” The author offers a balanced exploration of how “post-humanism” can inspire an enlarged perspective on how we can take responsibility for the nonhuman world. Unlike geologically and ecologically based terminology that is based on the fossil record—e.g., the dating of the start of the Holocene epoch back 11,700 years ago—the term Anthropocene signifies a cultural phenomenon that Purdy calls a way “of owning up to the responsibility for shaping the world.” The author traces the evolution of current ideas on environmentalism back to the first European settlers in America, who thought it was God's purpose for mankind to tame nature. This was succeeded by a romantic view of wilderness, exemplified by Ralph Waldo Emerson. A third phase, led by Theodore Roosevelt, responded to the ravages of industrial development, including the destruction of forests by timber interests and the extraction of raw materials by mining companies. Purdy identifies the last 50 years as a fourth phase, “the neoliberal Anthropocene,” which is “distinguished by a legal device that launders inequality almost as neatly as the global atmosphere: free contract within a global market.” The author employs numerous historical examples to strengthen his contention that climate change and the protection of other species cannot be dealt with via political polemics. We require a more pragmatic approach to living peacefully with nature and each other.
A profound vision of post-humanistic ethics.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-674-36822-4
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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