A well-researched, absorbing exploration of the darkest corners of the human mind.
A psychologist offers a new vision for humanity’s future by exploring the scientific foundations of our violent past.
While the “daily barrage of disheartening news” may seem like a 21st-century phenomenon, Loehr emphasizes its continuity within humanity’s long history of violence and hate. In this exposé of “the darker aspects of human nature,” he describes how war, genocide, prejudice, and corruption are embedded in the fundamental psychology of Homo sapiens. Claiming that the book’s exploration of the human mind will “shake the very core of your beliefs,” the author begins with the central evolutionary “flaw” of the human brain: its coded prioritization of self-preservation and the perpetuation of its progeny. While these concepts, ingrained in human DNA, have led to our dominance of the planet, they’ve also fostered hostility among humans as the species self-divided along emerging tribal and social identities. The book’s second part explores the consequences of these psychological traits, convincingly tracing them to humanity’s long history of war, genocide, and political corruption. The third part emphasizes the “Tug-of-War Between Altruism and Inhumanity,” noting humanity’s paradoxical “boundless capacity for goodness” and our simultaneous propensity toward violence. A particularly compelling chapter in this section explores the evolutionary history of morality. Loehr posits that, far from being an objective reality (as many religions claim), morality—when approached psychologically—is revealed to be a fundamentally malleable and subjective concept. As such, the brain often serves as humanity’s worst “enabler” by providing internal rationales that justify horrid acts of violence. The book’s fourth part shifts the focus from a pessimistic assessment of humans to propose ways that we can use modern neuroscience and psychology to create a “New Paradigm for Change.” Just as countless feral animal species have been domesticated in ways that reduce their natural instincts toward aggression, the author states, so too can humans “self-domesticate” and suppress their inborn tendencies. The book also includes a 20-week training program designed for individuals, teachers, coaches, and other vested parties to harness their knowledge of evolutionary biology and psychology to create a better future.
The author of 19 books (and the co-author of the 2005 national bestseller The Power of Full Engagement) and the co-founder of the Human Performance Institute, Loehr does a solid job of balancing his scientific overview with practical steps readers can take to apply the book’s content to their own lives. The main text is accompanied by a wealth of reflective questions designed for individual meditation or group discussion. The author draws upon a wealth of scholarly sources (the book features over 100 references) in crafting this well-researched, interdisciplinary work. The book’s impressive research is balanced by an engaging narrative that welcomes nonspecialists with jargon-free analysis. This emphasis on accessibility is reflected in the work’s efficiency (the book comes in at just under 165 total pages) and in its inclusion of ample charts, photographs, AI-generated images, and other visual elements. While cynical readers may remain skeptical of humanity’s ability to evolve, given our tarnished history, the book nevertheless makes a poignant call for the “urgency to act and instigate change on a global scale.”
A well-researched, absorbing exploration of the darkest corners of the human mind.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781944927158
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Kipcart Studio
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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