An invigorating look at big picture history across continents and millennia, and a survival manual to boot.
Giants are usually hard to fell—but when they fall, they fall hard.
“The average lifespan of a state is 326 years,” writes international relations scholar Kemp. “The largest states…are more fragile, lasting on average just 155 years.” What Kemp calls “Goliath states,” including Russia, China, and the U.S., “can be surprisingly fragile,” even though underlying all of them is the threat of violence via police, army, and other government agencies. In some instances, Kemp observes, the collapse of a state is a good thing: Somalia was better off without its dictatorship, even as warlords contended for power. Often, collapse is incremental, so that a peasant in the Italian countryside might not have been aware that the Roman Empire was falling apart. But just as often, collapse is cataclysmic, as Kemp fears it might be given multiple converging threats, including climate change, inequality, the rise of AI, and nuclear war. Societal collapse may then ensue, but, as Kemp notes, that is largely “about the fall of great power structures,” with elites standing the most to lose. Much of Kemp’s book is about the evolution of the state, revisiting anthropological views of Paleolithic societies as happier and more egalitarian than modern ones; archaeological evidence, he notes, suggests that moderns are about twice as likely to die violently than people 10,000 years ago. As humans acquired “lootable resources” unknown to their forebears, motivations for impersonal violence increased. Kemp’s book is wide ranging and full of useful and provocative theses, such as this one: “The more strongly states subjugate women, the more likely they are to be both autocratic and prone to failure.” Just so is his set of prescriptions for nations and people to survive the possibility of a catastrophic downfall: for states, for instance, the mandate to “make the world equal again”; for individuals, “Don’t be a dick.”
An invigorating look at big picture history across continents and millennia, and a survival manual to boot.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593321355
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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