A probing, well-informed investigation of global unrest calling for “truly transformative thinking” about humanity’s future.
How the failures of capitalism have led to “fear, confusion, loneliness and loss”—and global anger.
In this ambitious, deeply researched analysis, social critic and novelist Mishra (From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, 2012, etc.) makes a persuasive argument that industrialism and capitalism have spawned virulent expressions of anger. He sees current upheaval—which fuels the Islamic State group and led to Brexit and Donald Trump’s political success—stemming from the same source “as myriad Romantic revolts and rebellions of early nineteenth-century Europe”—i.e., “the mismatch between personal expectations, heightened by a traumatic break with the past, and the cruelly unresponsive reality of slow change.” Individual freedom can feel terrifying, leading to a desire for an authoritative leader and, as Tocqueville put it, an “insatiable need for action, violent emotions, vicissitudes, and dangers.” Mishra argues against taking an “us-them” view of the world as a contest between Western rationalism and “Islamofascism” but instead blames the current malaise on the West’s insistence on the superiority of Enlightenment philosophy and failure to deliver on its promise of progress. As the author writes, a “promised universal civilization—one harmonized by a combination of universal suffrage, broad educational opportunities, steady economic growth, and private initiative and personal advancement—has not materialized.” Most people, he believes, live fearfully in a world that they see they cannot control; they feel under siege by grisly horrors perpetrated by enemies, by the present and future effects of climate change, and by “arrogant and deceptive elites” who make them feel humiliated. Mishra bases his sage analysis on the “eclectic ideas” of European social theorists, including Dostoyevsky, Arendt, Heine, Marx, and scores of others. He especially highlights the contrast between Voltaire, “an unequivocal top-down modernizer,” and Rousseau, who “tried to outline a social order where morals, virtue and human character rather than commerce and money were central to politics.”
A probing, well-informed investigation of global unrest calling for “truly transformative thinking” about humanity’s future.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-27478-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A...
Valediction from the late neurologist and writer Sacks (On the Move: A Life, 2015, etc.).
In this set of four short essays, much-forwarded opinion pieces from the New York Times, the author ponders illness, specifically the metastatic cancer that spread from eye to liver and in doing so foreclosed any possibility of treatment. His brief reflections on that unfortunate development give way to, yes, gratitude as he examines the good things that he has experienced over what, in the end, turned out to be a rather long life after all, lasting 82 years. To be sure, Sacks has regrets about leaving the world, not least of them not being around to see “a thousand…breakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences,” as well as the night sky sprinkled with stars and the yellow legal pads on which he worked sprinkled with words. Sacks works a few familiar tropes and elaborates others. Charmingly, he reflects on his habit since childhood of associating each year of his life with the element of corresponding atomic weight on the periodic table; given polonium’s “intense, murderous radioactivity,” then perhaps 84 isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. There are some glaring repetitions here, unfortunate given the intense brevity of this book, such as his twice citing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s call to revel in “intercourse with the world”—no, not that kind. Yet his thoughts overall—while not as soul-stirringly inspirational as the similar reflections of Randy Pausch or as bent on chasing down the story as Christopher Hitchens’ last book—are shaped into an austere beauty, as when Sacks writes of being able in his final moments to “see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.”
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A fitting, lovely farewell.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-49293-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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