Fresh insights about the ways we understand reality.
Why humans need to tell new stories.
Literary scholar Gottschall, who celebrated humans’ propensity for telling tales in The Storytelling Animal, now considers ways stories “sway us for the worse.” Why, he asks, thinking of conspiracy stories (which are not, he insists, theories), climate change deniers, and news stories that produce feelings of despair, “do stories seem to be driving our species mad?” Given the ubiquity of stories in every culture and their potential to create conflict, he focuses his thoughtful and entertaining investigation on a critical question: “How can we save the world from stories?” Drawing on philosophy (Plato is a recurring figure), psychology, anthropology, neurobiology, history, and literature and interweaving personal anecdotes and snippets of popular culture, Gottschall acknowledges that stories have powerful emotional impact. From ancient times, they emerged “as a tool of tribal cohesion and competition,” structured with a “universal grammar” that is “paranoid and vindictive”: Characters try to solve predicaments, facing trouble and often a clearly defined villain. Such stories generate empathy for the characters in peril while creating a kind of “moral blindness” regarding villains. This paradigm, Gottschall argues, shapes our stories about society, politics, and even history, “a genre of speculative narrative that projects our current obsessions onto the past.” Rather than depict Nazis or White supremacists as villains, Gottschall suggests that they were not “worse people than us” but had the “moral misfortune” of being born into cultures which mistakenly defined bad as good. When we villainize, he warns, we dehumanize, sinking into sanctimony and hate. With “folk tales” erupting and spreading “with incredible speed and ease on the internet” and with a political figure he dubs the Big Blare reigning as a supreme storyteller, Gottschall exhorts readers to become aware of storytelling biases and to learn to tell a story “where we are protagonists on the same quest.”
Fresh insights about the ways we understand reality.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5416-4596-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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