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 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
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
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