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: July 15, 2025
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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
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