Next book

THE END OF WORK

THE DECLINE OF THE GLOBAL LABOR FORCE AND THE DAWN OF THE POST-MARKET ERA

A professional alarmist's attention-grabbing, albeit overstated, appraisal of a brave new world in which demand for labor could fall ruinously short of supply. Citing anecdotal evidence from a wealth of secondary sources, Rifkin (Biosphere Politics, 1991) provides worst-case projections of the job-loss havoc that remains to be wreaked by labor-saving advances in agriculture, banking, manufacturing, retailing, transport, and other enterprises that once afforded secure employment. Given the gains routinely achieved in the state of the bioscience, computer, robotics, and allied arts, he insists that there's precious little reason to believe that downsizing American corporations and their foreign counterparts won't continue to do more with less. Unless immediate steps are taken to rectify the situation, the author warns, civil unrest, open conflict between haves and have-nots, or even anarchy could result from what he calls the third industrial revolution. Not too surprisingly, Rifkin offers a lengthy list of suggestions for protecting the global village from the socioeconomic crises that could erupt when and if technology idles new multitudes of erstwhile breadwinners. To illustrate, he urges sharing of productivity gains (e.g., via shorter work weeks) and greater incentives for participation in the voluntary (i.e., non-marketplace) sector, such as time-based tax deductions. The author goes on to propose that government should encourage communitarian activity by substituting so-called social wages (e.g. negative income tax) for welfare. As a practical matter, then, Rifkin is recommending utopian solutions for the dystopian problems that could accrue in the arguable event that current trends persist. (Robert L. Heilbroner provides the book's foreword.) A bleak reckoning of the potential price of progress that will strike many observers as longer on ardor than analysis. (First printing of 50,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-87477-779-8

Page Count: 368

Publisher: TarcherPerigee

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994

Categories:
Next book

MASTERY

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...

Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.

The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.

Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012

Categories:
Next book

BRAVE ENOUGH

These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.

A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.

What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.

These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-101-946909

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015

Categories:
Close Quickview