A thorough yet elitist program for Saudi Arabia’s economic revitalization centered on scientific development.
A professor offers a comprehensive plan for the revival of Saudi Arabia’s research and innovation sector.
Al-Shamsi, a professor of civil engineering at Riyadh’s King Abdulaziz City for Science & Technology, begins his work by harkening back to Islam’s golden age. From Cordoba to Baghdad, Muslims exported scientific breakthroughs across Europe, Asia, and Africa. With God’s help and a remodeling of Saudi Arabia’s national research and innovation system, he hopes that Muslims can again lead the world in exporting significant scientific advances. One of the biggest obstacles the author sees is the country’s current system of funding subcontractors to conduct research. Far too often, subcontractors divert their funding to foreign researchers and academic institutions for self-promotion and publication in prestigious international scientific journals. This undermines the Saudi research and development system by using limited government money to support foreign institutions. Moreover, despite thriving Saudi petrochemical, oil, and date industries, foreign governments and businesses not only manufacture their “entire production lines,” but also continue to wield influence by controlling the technical expertise necessary to maintain them. This reliance on foreign nations for technology and expertise also applies to the Saudi military. For Al-Shamsi, economic independence and homeland security will only be guaranteed by a new era of Arab innovation that serves the interests not just of individual researchers, but the nation as well. The author proposes dozens of intriguing ideas on how the Saudi government can foster homegrown innovation. These include the creation of new government councils that report directly to the prime minister, new patent laws and greater protections on intellectual property, and the funding of Saudi industrial expositions and scientific journals. Overflowing with national pride, this book will surely appeal to anyone interested in internal reform revolving around economic progress in the Arab world. But while the benefits of a scientific revolution may ultimately trickle down to the masses, the work’s target audience comprises government and business leaders. Reforms in human and civil rights are noticeably absent from a volume that focuses on reestablishing Saudi Arabia as an innovator of scientific ideas.
A thorough yet elitist program for Saudi Arabia’s economic revitalization centered on scientific development.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-71447-820-0
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Blurb
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A remarkably thorough and thoughtful case for the reconciliation between science and faith.
A duo of French mathematicians makes the scientific case for God in this nonfiction book.
Since its 2021 French-language publication in Paris, this work by Bolloré and Bonnassies has sold more than 400,000 copies. Now translated into English for the first time by West and Jones, the book offers a new introduction featuring endorsements from a range of scientists and religious leaders, including Nobel Prize-winning astronomers and Roman Catholic cardinals. This appeal to authority, both religious and scientific, distinguishes this volume from a genre of Christian apologetics that tends to reject, rather than embrace, scientific consensus. Central to the book’s argument is that contemporary scientific advancements have undone past emphases on materialist interpretations of the universe (and their parallel doubts of spirituality). According to the authors’ reasoned arguments, what now forms people’s present understanding of the universe—including quantum mechanics, relativity, and the Big Bang—puts “the question of the existence of a creator God back on the table,” given the underlying implications. Einstein’s theory of relativity, for instance, presupposes that if a cause exists behind the origin of the universe, then it must be atemporal, non-spatial, and immaterial. While the book’s contentions related to Christianity specifically, such as its belief in the “indisputable truths contained in the Bible,” may not be as convincing as its broader argument on how the idea of a creator God fits into contemporary scientific understanding, the volume nevertheless offers a refreshingly nuanced approach to the topic. From the work’s outset, the authors (academically trained in math and engineering) reject fundamentalist interpretations of creationism (such as claims that Earth is only 6,000 years old) as “fanciful beliefs” while challenging the philosophical underpinnings of a purely materialist understanding of the universe that may not fit into recent scientific paradigm shifts. Featuring over 500 pages and more than 600 research notes, this book strikes a balance between its academic foundations and an accessible writing style, complemented by dozens of photographs from various sources, diagrams, and charts.
A remarkably thorough and thoughtful case for the reconciliation between science and faith.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9789998782402
Page Count: 562
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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