A spirited, often entertaining rant against things as they are.
When did Americans come to shun reality? When did the American experiment become a congeries of solipsisms?
“As I pass by fish in barrels,” writes Studio 360 host Andersen (True Believers, 2012, etc.) at the outset of this entertaining tour of American irreality, “I will often shoot them.” Indeed he does, but then, as writers as various as H.L. Mencken and Christopher Hitchens long ago discovered, American society offers endless targets. Andersen finds a climacteric in Karl Rove’s pronouncement, a dozen years ago, that those people who live in “the reality-based community” need to understand that “that’s not the way the world really works anymore.” True enough: Andersen closes with the rise of Trump-ism and its “critical mass of fantasy and lies” that is in danger of becoming “something much worse than nasty, oafish, reality-show pseudoconservatism.” It’s not just the Trumpies who are ruining things for everyone; by the author’s account, the nice liberals who refuse to vaccinate their children are as much a part of the problem as those who flock to creation museums and megachurches. All are waystations of Andersen’s “Fantasyland,” an assemblage not just of scattered false beliefs, but whole lifestyles cobbled from them, which lands us in the 1960s and its ethos: “Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.” It’s not, but that’s where we are today, at least by Andersen’s account, though he hastens to add that approving nods to political correctness are not necessarily the same thing as endorsing perniciousness. Throughout, the author names names—Dr. Oz, for one, won’t be happy, and neither will Oprah—and takes no prisoners, offering incitement for the rest of us to do the same. “We need to become less squishy,” Andersen writes, and instead gird up for some reality-based arguments against the “dangerously untrue and unreal.”
A spirited, often entertaining rant against things as they are.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6721-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
A lyrical work of intellectual history, one that Popova’s many followers will await eagerly and that deserves to win her...
The polymathic Popova, presiding genius behind brainpickings.org, looks at some of the forgotten heroes of science, art, and culture.
“There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives,” writes the author at the outset. She closes with the realization that while we individuals may die, the beauty of our lives and work, if meaningful, will endure: “What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust." In between, she peppers thoughtful, lucid consideration of acts of the imagination with stories that, if ever aired before, are too little known. Who would have remembered that of all the details of the pioneering astronomer Johannes Kepler’s life, one was racing across Germany to come to the aid of his widowed mother, who had been charged with witchcraft? The incident ably frames Kepler’s breaking out of a world governed by superstition, “a world in which God is mightier than nature, the Devil realer and more omnipresent than gravity,” and into a radical, entirely different world governed by science. That world saw many revolutions and advances ahead of the general population, as when, in 1865, Vassar College appointed as its first professor of astronomy a woman, Maria Mitchell, who combined a brilliant command of science with a yearning for poetry. So it was with Rachel Carson, the great ecologist, whose love for a woman lasted across a life burdened with terrible illness, and Emily Dickinson, who might have been happier had her own love for a woman been realized. (As it was, Popova notes, the world was ready for Dickinson: A book of her poems published four years after her death sold 500 copies on the first day of publication.) Throughout her complex, consistently stimulating narrative, the author blends biography, cultural criticism, and journalism to forge elegant connections: Dickinson feeds in to Carson, who looks back to Mitchell, who looks forward to Popova herself, and with plenty of milestones along the way: Kepler, Goethe, Pauli, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne….
A lyrical work of intellectual history, one that Popova’s many followers will await eagerly and that deserves to win her many more.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4813-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Despite its glaring absence of women philosophers, Grayling’s accessible omnibus will provide a steppingstone for the...
A magnificent recapping of the history of philosophy, as it stands apart from theology, in the classic model of Bertrand Russell, as “an invitation and an entrance.”
In the hands of British scholar and journalist Grayling (Master/New Coll. of the Humanities; Democracy and Its Crisis, 2018, etc.), it is a delight to engage in this sweeping history of the great thinkers throughout the ages, from pre-Socratics to the present. Moreover, in the last section of the book, the author offers a considerably shorter yet fair introduction to Indian, Chinese, Arabic-Persian, and African philosophy (hindered only by the “veil” of language, yet he ends with a challenge to readers to address this surmountable difficulty). The attempt to “make sense of things” has plagued humanity for centuries and has also led to its great advances, especially the “rise of modern thought” in terms of empiricism and rationalism as they gained momentum from the 17th century. These great forces unharnessed philosophy from the strictures of religion, culminating in the essential concept, particularly by Immanuel Kant and his fellow Enlightenment thinkers, that the “autonomy” of man meant “self-government, independence of thought, and possession of the right and the responsibility to make choices about one’s own life.” As Grayling notes, this is “essential to the life worth living,” a matter dear to the very “first” philosophers: Thales, who relied on observation and reason to “know thyself,” and Socrates, for whom the first great question was how to live. As he moves into the more recondite reaches of “analytic” and language philosophy of the 20th century, the author mostly keeps the narrative from becoming overly academic. Unfortunately, there is a disturbing lack of women philosophers across Grayling’s 2,500-year survey, even under the cursory rubric of “feminist philosophy.” The author’s approach is especially refreshing due to his acknowledgement that few philosophers were truly unique (even Buddha or Confucius); often what was required for lasting significance was a kind of luck and a stable of devoted followers.
Despite its glaring absence of women philosophers, Grayling’s accessible omnibus will provide a steppingstone for the student or novice.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7874-8
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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