Though endlessly arguable, a well-written book whose premises and prescriptions bear consideration.
A lively series of thought experiments on how to create a more just and equitable society.
Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and East European studies and author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, observes that there are many built-in aspects of modern society whose ancient roots yield “decidedly inegalitarian and sexist” results. Against these, she proposes “utopian” solutions, which many readers may dismiss as impractical. The author argues vigorously that they are not. Housing is created with the presumption that someone—usually a woman—will do the cooking, cleaning, and routine maintenance behind closed doors. But what if communities were developed with private residences for sleeping and relaxing but with communal cooking spaces? The idea of private, enclosed homes is considered “normal,” Ghodsee writes, but “we might be more flexible than we imagine.” One knock-on effect is the communal raising of children, freeing mothers from the “disproportionate burden” they bear while also reimagining the nuclear family to incorporate a loving community. Borrowing from the language of economics, Ghodsee considers children as a “public good”—i.e., a source of future support for previous generations, whether childless or not, and therefore worthy of attention and public investment, since “current citizens will (if they live long enough) depend on their contributions to society.” Further proposals include the decommodification of education and the establishment of controls so that anyone, regardless of their career path, would enjoy a living wage: “What if we were all less worried about the future because we lived in societies where one’s ability to have a decent life had little relationship to one’s profession?” Though Ghodsee’s proposals are decidedly utopian, readers who think deeper about them may agree that reshaping society is not such an unworkable thing after all.
Though endlessly arguable, a well-written book whose premises and prescriptions bear consideration.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781982190217
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.
The noted historian and New Yorker staffer looks into a future ruled by machines.
Thirty-odd years ago, writes Lepore, liberal democracies of old were being transformed into both authoritarian or autocratic regimes and by “automatocracy, rule by automation, government by machine-driven computation, prediction, and persuasion.” In this pointed rejoinder to Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which foresaw a world in which humans were essentially superfluous, Lepore charts a long history that extends deep into the “machine age,” beginning in the 17th century, which saw “the artificial as existing not only outside the natural but above it, an improvement upon it.” In this conception, humans were fallible, while machines faithfully and unfailingly obeyed the rules set for them. A logical progression followed in the 1920s with the rise of the Technocracy movement, a variety of fascism widely accepted in the U.S. that held that far from being free and equal, humans should be governed by scientists and engineers who alone “have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of twentieth-century life.” It’s a short hop from there to the present, with tech billionaires pushing AI and, in the case of the influential “self-described ‘neo-monarchist’” Curtis Yarvin, a dictatorship aided by it. In all this, Lepore writes, it is not just the human animal that suffers but all animals and all habitats, which can only worsen with the incessant demands for energy, rare earths, and water that AI requires. And what “humans crave, in that artificial world, is nature,” a nature that is increasingly silenced. This undemocratic world, benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of all else, is a prison of screens and keyboards from which, she writes memorably, “What is required is to imagine an escape, and then to conduct it.”
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781324098423
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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