A well-researched exploration of the forces that shape contemporary life and a hopeful vision for the future.
A U.K.-based educator reflects on current sociopolitical and economic issues.
Hodson is a staunch believer in the potential of humans to improve the systems that shape their lives, and in this book, he draws on his own international travels and interactions with diverse students as a secondary school history teacher. He’s also a realist, one who recognizes the effects of entrenched power structures and how legacies of colonialism, war, and political ideologies reverberate into the present. Indeed, much of the work’s commentary centers on harmful ideas in contemporary life, including classism in the U.K., racism in the United States, and the caste system in India. The author also critiques specific people, including President Donald Trump, citing his labeling of Covid-19 as the “China virus” as one aspect of America’s “us first” approach. The book similarly notes how dominant groups use culture wars to target people in the minority. The chapters are organized thematically, covering topics that range from government structures and challenges to democratic norms to ethical questions surrounding biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and other technological advancements. Although the content largely focuses on the present, Hodson’s goal is to challenge readers to envision a better future, based on what he calls a “New Enlightenment.” The author, whose previous book focused on British history, offers refreshingly nuanced historical takes in this work. His analysis of the first Enlightenment, for instance, notes how it challenged established interests, but also set the stage for Eurocentrism. The book’s citations, featured in a network of footnotes and multi-page bibliography, include varied philosophical perspectives that range from Immanuel Kant to Peter Singer and Pankaj Mishra. At almost 500 pages in length, the volume is dauntingly thorough, but its accessible style distills complex information into an engaging narrative.
A well-researched exploration of the forces that shape contemporary life and a hopeful vision for the future.Pub Date: April 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781914390364
Page Count: 502
Publisher: Arena Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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