A challenging but soaringly optimistic blueprint for upgrading the human race.
A sweeping view of how to improving the world through better communication.
Waters frankly admits that the claims he makes about educating the world by making people “guise-wise” (i.e., heightening their awareness of how they perceive others and how others perceive them) make him sound “absurdly ambitious and…like either a fruit-case or someone with a very bloated ego,” but he’s convinced that he’s discerned the central problem underlying most of humanity’s problems—people either can’t or won’t shift their identities, which informs the ways they view the world. Humanity’s “Response Default Setting,” he claims, is to notice and then emphasize (even magnify) difference, all in the service of tribalism. This “default setting” is behind all the ills humans import into the world, the “demonization, dehumanization and genocide.” Here, Waters, a consultant and coach, expands on his belief that only by addressing this universal internal setting and changing it to something more broad can humanity survive and advance from its current state. “From family feuding to global warming, our problems aren’t just of our own making, they are of our own make-up,” he writes. “This means they will persist as long as we stay as we are.” In order to fix these problems, he asserts that people must exercise far more awareness of their commonalities to move all of humanity through an “upgrade.” Waters writes in an engaging style that’s both clear and substantive: “Messages are generally injunctions,” he warns at one point. “They tell us to believe or do something, but they don’t require us to engage or act in line with them.” At every turn, he respects his readers’ intelligence and is fully aware that he’s presenting a perhaps unrealistic solution for impossibly complex world problems. His calm, nonjudgmental synthesis will give readers food for thought, though, even if his one-trick fix remains ultimately unconvincing.
A challenging but soaringly optimistic blueprint for upgrading the human race.Pub Date: May 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-80074-286-4
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Olympia Publishers
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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