A refreshingly rosy assessment of how far many of us have come from the days when life was uniformly nasty, brutish, and...
Cato Institute senior fellow Norberg (Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation with Home Ownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis, 2009, etc.) surveys human history and finds “things have been getting better—overwhelmingly so.”
In this brightly written, upbeat book, the Swedish author blends facts, anecdotes, and official statistics to describe “humanity’s triumph” in achieving the present unparalleled level of global living standards. By virtually every measure—food, sanitation, life expectancy, poverty, violence, the environment, literacy, freedom, equality, the conditions of childhood—life has improved for most people, writes the author. Much of the progress stems from 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers, who believed “the world could steadily improve if reason was set free,” thereby encouraging innovation and problem-solving. Major breakthroughs have fed upon one another: better access to food and health care, for example, have made it possible to work more and ensured “even better nutrition and even better health.” Growths in wealth, knowledge, trade, and technology have been chief animating forces. As a result, humanity has enjoyed a remarkable array of life improvements, often overlooked in our daily preoccupation with bad news: average life expectancy in the world has gone from 31 years in 1900 to 71 today. Malnutrition in Peru has declined by 76 percent since 1990. Global literacy jumped from 21 percent in 1900 to 86 percent in 2015. Poverty dropped by 24 percent in India between 1993 and 2012. Slavery, which existed worldwide in 1800, has been formally banned everywhere. Norberg reminds us that throughout history, parents often had to bury their children. He notes certain individuals have played key roles: Maurice Hilleman, developer of the measles vaccine, is among those who saved the most lives in history. While acknowledging the mayhem, hunger, and poverty still facing much of the world, the author remains optimistic that human ingenuity will prevail in shaping the future.
A refreshingly rosy assessment of how far many of us have come from the days when life was uniformly nasty, brutish, and short.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78074-950-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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