An astute, original-minded analysis of the apocalyptic thinking that links tech, politics, and religion.
Identifying and combating the opportunists hastening global breakdown.
From two of the left’s sharpest thinkers, this inspired book maps the ideas common to three virulent strains of contemporary politics. Many religious “fanatics,” tech billionaires, and ethno-nationalists “are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating,” write Klein (The Shock Doctrine, 2007) and Taylor (Remake the World, 2021). “End timers” predict “only a small, deserving group of humans will survive” a chaotic future. If this apocalyptic worldview isn’t new, it’s “extraordinary” that doomsayers of the “new fascist right,” having capitalized on major crises, now steer numerous governments. Ethno-nationalists, the authors write, vilify people fleeing wars and other strife, “displacing the very real awareness that we are approaching planetary limits onto the world’s vulnerable.” Silicon Valley, courting President Trump, has “abandoned” green-friendly policies, building massive “fossil-fuel-burning data centers” for its “giant human elimination machine”: artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, extreme right-wingers now lead the Israeli police and the U.S. military, where their actions align with the outlook of the “messianic right.” These dire forces aren’t insurmountable, write Klein and Taylor. They find hopeful signs in Memphis, Tennessee, where activists oppose a data center, and Minneapolis, site of a 100,000-strong “anti-ICE general strike.” The authors propose additional ideas for fighting back; these are smart but familiar. With an eye toward “AI containment,” they’d “strictly regulate” tech and “redistribute” much of the wealth the industry generates. Backing taxes that would act as “robust controls on wealth,” they parry the argument that this would discourage innovation. Higher World War II-era taxes paid for “public research that produced transistors, microchips, satellites, and the start of the internet.” Righteously alarmed, the authors have given us a new way to grasp some of our biggest problems.
An astute, original-minded analysis of the apocalyptic thinking that links tech, politics, and religion.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780374621384
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
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
BOOK REVIEW
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
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