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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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