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
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
