Captivating, opinionated history from a knowledgeable source.
The bestselling British historian offers his thoughts on major disasters, including the current pandemic, with an emphasis on why humans handle them so badly.
After seeing his warnings about the severity of Covid-19 ignored in early 2020, Ferguson revived his interest in the role of disasters in world history. The result is this assertive, intensely researched, sometimes unconvincing, but always entertaining account. “Historians tend to gravitate toward the study of…extreme disasters, with a preference for the man-made varieties,” writes the author. “Yet they seldom reflect very deeply on their common properties.” With all disasters, the social context is crucial: A hurricane or earthquake is of no consequence unless there are people around. Perhaps most important of all, Ferguson emphasizes, these phenomena tend to follow “power laws” rather than the familiar normal distribution such as human heights. There is no average forest fire, stock market drop, or measles outbreak. Major catastrophes occur so rarely that few of us take the risk personally and continue to invest in risky stocks, settle in flood plains, and thrill at the beginning of the latest war. Historians follow every disaster with an explanation. Thus, they explain that the shocking 1914 outbreak of World War I was caused by decades of competition between Europe’s great powers. Ferguson disagrees, preferring Tolstoy’s view that human calamities are natural phenomena comparable to a hurricane. “Most disasters occur when a complex system goes critical,” writes the author, “usually as a result of some small perturbation.” After a handful of familiar examples (the Titanic, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, etc.), Ferguson returns to Covid, an ongoing preoccupation that he describes in superb detail. Unquestionably an economic disaster, in terms of lives lost, the author labels it a “medium-size disaster”—comparable to the 1957-1958 influenza pandemic rather than the epic 1918-1919 Spanish flu. Ferguson ends in September 2020, before the pandemic’s massive upswing, so future editions will require an addendum.
Captivating, opinionated history from a knowledgeable source.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-29737-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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