Super trend spotter and premier historian of future events Naisbitt (Megatrends, 1982, etc.) and his co-authors (his daughter and artist Philips) examine trends in nascent technology and find much portentous material. They prescribe “high touch” (as in New Age touchy-feely) to counter foreboding high tech. Sixty-nine years ago a little gem called Whither, Whither, Or After Sex, What? was published. Naisbitt and his colleagues have similar concerns, expressed with equal alarm but much more serious mien. They have assiduously surveyed the current scene from the Human Genome Project to the Littleton school massacre. Statistics abound. They have interviewed at least fourscore experts, from the archbishop of the Eastern Province of the International Communion of the Charismatic Episcopal Church, Diocese of the Potomac, to Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf. America has entered a “technology intoxication zone,” they say. We worship technology, love it as a toy. We can’t distinguish real from fake. We accept violence, live distracted lives, and use religion as a quick fix. Technology is the currency of our lives, and we look to Martha Stewart to buck the trend. The computer games used by the military to train warriors are exactly the ones played by the nation’s children. “I think it’s scary,” says Gen. Schwarzkopf. Violence in the media is pervasive and becoming hard-wired in our youth. From thoughts of technoviolence, the survey turns to biotech. We can have sex, of course, without having children and have children without having sex. After sex, what? It may be genetic engineering of people as well as food. How that notion affects religion is given appropriate weight before the authors turn to what they call “Specimen Art.” That is the more or less artistic display of specimens like DNA, body fluids, innards, pickled pigs, and human cadavers. It’s becoming popular, and Naisbitt seems well pleased with this particular trend. It shows the essential unity of creation, he says. Eye-opening and not a little frightening, Naisbitt’s passing parade prompts discussion. Whither, indeed! ($125,000 ad/promo; author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1999
ISBN: 0-7679-0383-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
As sharp and insightful as one would expect from this acclaimed author.
Essays focused on an overarching question: “What is race (other than genetic imagination), and why does it matter?”
Melding memoir, history, and trenchant literary analysis, Nobel Prize laureate Morrison (Emeritus, Humanities/Princeton Univ.; God Help the Child, 2015, etc.) offers perceptive reflections on the configuration of Otherness. Revised from her Norton Lectures at Harvard, the volume consists of six essays that consider how race is conceived, internalized, and culturally transmitted, drawing in part on writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Joseph Conrad, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the African writer Camara Laye, whose novel The Radiance of the King Morrison greatly admires. Laye told the story of a white man, stranded and destitute in Africa, struggling to maintain his assumptions of white privilege. For Morrison, the novel illuminates the pressures that “make us deny the foreigner in ourselves and make us resist to the death the commonness of humanity.” She also offers insightful glosses into her own aims as a novelist. “Narrative fiction,” she writes, “provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination.” In Beloved, for example, she reimagined the story of Margaret Garner, a slave who had killed her children rather than see them enslaved, as she had been. In A Mercy, she examined “the journey from sympathetic race relations to violent ones fostered by religion.” In Paradise, she delved into the issue of hierarchies of blackness by looking at “the contradictory results of devising a purely raced community”; she purposely did not identify her characters’ race in order to “simultaneously de-fang and theatricalize race, signaling, I hoped, how moveable and hopelessly meaningless the construct was.” In God Help the Child, Morrison considered “the triumphalism and deception that colorism fosters.” Her current novel in progress, she discloses, explores “the education of a racist—how does one move from a non-racial womb to the womb of racism”?
As sharp and insightful as one would expect from this acclaimed author.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-674-97645-0
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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The collected "pieces" of the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain form a compelling unit as he applies the high drama of poetry and sociology to a penetrating analysis of the Negro experience on the American and European scene.
He bares the brutal boners of "everybody's protest novel" from Stowe to Wright; points out that black is "devil-color" according to Christian theology and to "make white" is thus to save; reveals the positive base of Carmen Jones, movie version, as Negroes are white, that is, moral. Beyond such artistic attitudinal displays lie experimental realities: the Harlem Ghetto with its Negro press, the positive element of which tries to emulate the white press and provides an incongruous mixture of slick style and stark subject; the Ghetto with its churches and its hatred of the American reality behind the Jewish face (from which, as sufferers, so much was expected). There is a trip to Atlanta for the Wallace campaign and indignities endured; there is a beautiful essay, from which the book takes its title- of father and son and the corroding power of hate as it could grow from injustice. In Europe, there is the encounter of African and American Negro; a sojourn in jail over a stolen sheet; and last, the poignant essay of the first Negro to come to a remote Swiss village, to be greeted as a living wonder. This is not true in America, where he has a place, though equivocal, in our united life.
The expression of so many insights enriches rather than clarifies, and behind every page stalks a man, an everyman, seeking his identity...and ours. Exceptional writing.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1955
ISBN: 0807064319
Page Count: -
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1955
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PERSPECTIVES
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