A well-intentioned work with some worthy ideas, but spread much too thin.
A scattered invocation of the better future that will come when we give up on the idea of progress.
“Like it or not, each of us is caught up in a giant biosphere classroom where we are learning the lesson that each and every act we engage in requires some change, no matter how trifling, in the natural world we inhabit,” writes Rifkin, noting that as a species we’ve done more than trifling damage to the world. As he enumerates, if we each ate 300 trout per year, then those trout would have had to eat 90,000 frogs, which in turn ate 27 million grasshoppers. Given that we eat cows, chickens, and pigs, and not so many trout, our food chain is a kind of economic transaction with “a long entropic tail.” Blame it on a system that assumes that nature is there for our convenience and the point of life is to accrue profit by being efficient actors in the marketplace. Against this, sounding like Charles Reich, Rifkin intones such mantras as “Biophilia is the next evolution of empathic consciousness.” That’s all well and good, but while we’re learning to love our fellow creatures, the world is rapidly disintegrating, and one wonders whether there’s enough time to become resilient—adaptable, that is—enough to embrace the author’s program. Among its tenets: The natural world must be restored, climate change has to be fought, communities need to become “peerocracies,” and children should be educated in such a way that “the natural biophilic impulse embedded in a child’s genetic makeup be expressed and flourish in preschool and continue to mature throughout the schooling experience.” It’s a big program, and Rifkin tries to say too much in too few pages; this book is less on point than some of his previous ones, especially Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of Cattle Culture.
A well-intentioned work with some worthy ideas, but spread much too thin.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-09354-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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