A timely and disturbing study of flawed, dangerous thinking.
A Daily Beast reporter probes the relationship between flat Earth beliefs and the rise of modern conspiracy theories.
Before the pandemic, the 2020 presidential election, and civil unrest changed the world, Weill regarded flat Eartherism as “something close to a joke.” Yet as the Trump administration and its penchant for “alternative facts” fed social and political turmoil at home and abroad, Weill was “stripped…of [the] smugness” she felt for believing that most people were grounded in reality. She looked more closely into the flat Eartherism she derided and discovered social parallels that intrigued as much as they unsettled. As the author notes, anti-globalism emerged out of the ashes of a failed socialist experiment—itself intended as a form of rebellion against the Industrial Revolution—in 19th century Britain. Weill attributes the persistence of this anti-scientific belief less to the delusions of crackpots like flat Earth movement founder Samuel Rowbotham and more to the idea that the conspiracy thinking in which flat Eartherism is grounded results when humans are faced with the incomprehensible and uncontrollable. Turning her attention to contemporary history, the author suggests how the internet—in particular, social media—has wrought havoc on truth by helping to disseminate disinformation. In turn, this has helped create a paranoid culture and “conspiratorial melting pot” in which Rowbotham’s flat Eartherism has not only flourished, but also “cross-pollinated” with everything from anti-vaccination advocates to QAnon conspiracy theories. Perhaps most unnerving of all of Weill’s observations is that conspiratorial movements and cults are “cousins”—both have dogmatic followers that not only “keep each other in line,” but also keep themselves “away from the outside world.” This provocative book is sure to inspire debate about conspiracy theories as well as how citizens of a fractured world can learn to overcome their fear of radical planetary change.
A timely and disturbing study of flawed, dangerous thinking.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64375-068-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
Top Chef fans might savor this detailed account, but others will find it bland.
The Top Chef host describes her journey to new heights.
For those who don’t know, Kish is a “gay Korean adopted woman, born in Seoul, raised in Michigan” and “a chef, a character, a host, and a cultural communicator—as well as a human being with a beating heart.” Though this book covers every step of her journey, every restaurant job and television role, and also discusses her experience as an adoptee (very positive) and a queer woman (late bloomer), the storytelling is so straightforward, lacking in suspense, character development, or dialogue, that it is basically a long version of its (longish) “About the Author.” Seemingly dramatic situations are not dramatized—when she was eliminated on her first Top Chef run, she assures us that she did the best she could, and drops it. “I can spare you the gory details (bouillabaisse and big personalities were involved).” Later, she cites a belief in protecting the privacy of others to omit the story of her first relationship with a woman. With no character development, neither does the reader get to know those who fall outside the privacy zone, like her best friend, Steph, and her wife, Bianca. When she gets mad, she says things like, “It’s a gross understatement to say I was crushed, beyond frustrated, and furious with the situation.” The fact that “I’ve never been a big reader” does not come as a surprise. It is more surprising when she confesses that “I believe the universe is selective about the moments in which it introduces life-changing prospects.”
Top Chef fans might savor this detailed account, but others will find it bland.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780316580915
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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
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