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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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