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
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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