Sage advice and a much-needed perspective on how to build a future that benefits our species’ survival.
A futurist offers ways to improve the way we think about our decisions.
In his debut book, designer and writer Foster asks you to imagine the future. Whatever comes to mind, whether robots, glimmering gadgets, a sprouting civilization on another planet, or a grim wasteland where crops die and battles rage, may depend on what kinds of movies, books, ads, and media you’ve consumed. As a top designer at Google, Nokia, and Sony, Foster spent his career imagining next-generation spaces and products and offers up a framework for thinking about the present and future. “Our generation is experiencing technological and societal change at a rate and magnitude not felt by our ancestors, and the effects of this change can be bewildering,” Foster writes. But what if we considered the future more as an extension of today? With thoughtful descriptions of four mindsets, hence the book’s title, Foster blends history with current events to probe different ways humans tackle big issues, and the pitfalls and the positives of each. So-called “could” futurists, he writes, “harbor fantasies of incredible new worlds” and are “frustrated by pragmatism, rationalism, and skepticism.” Then comes “should” futurism, which Foster describes as a “strong-willed, opinionated, and cocksure confection.” Faced with a proclamation that this or that product or path will make things “better,” Foster suggests continually asking “why,” as a toddler would, to melt the “corporate gibberish” and reveal the “naked ambitions” beneath. “Might” futurists are broad thinkers but can be indecisive, whereas the “don’t” sector distrusts power and is drawn to negative consequences while exploring the full lifespan of an idea and its impact. Foster warns against sticking too closely to any of the four mindsets and begs readers to train themselves to think of the future in a way that is “less about what you saw in a sci-fi movie and more about where you buy your chewing gum.” Ultimately, the book strikes a hopeful note, as this GenX author points to us now entering “something of a golden age of dread about the future” and hails the younger generation for thinking about the future “from a position of responsibility and long-termism.”
Sage advice and a much-needed perspective on how to build a future that benefits our species’ survival.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9780374619350
Page Count: 272
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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