Richly inclusive and wonderfully hopeful, Pogany’s theories are dense with dark matter, but lively.
Economist Pogany presents his new historical materialism to explain the unfolding of history.
Certainly there are elements of chance, randomness and entropy involved, writes Pogany, but the flow of history is a material process, “the complexifying self-organization of interconnected, brain-anchored codes on a global scale.” Once readers get beyond the leaf storm of his theory’s new wordplay, most will understand that the author is addressing how a burgeoning population will contend with the Earth’s material limitations and ideological flounderings, and perhaps even emerge with a higher form of cohesive global organization and decision making. He locates and expands upon the emergence of global systems after the French Revolution, a laissez faire period up to World War I, and a chaotic transition until the end of World War II, when a mixed economy/weak multilateralism attained steady state. Today, cultural evolution (the transformation of the mind, productive forces and relations, ethics, consciousness, language and intentionality, all at once) has taken us to the apex of the current global system. The fruits of past thought, technological advance and the progress of scientific thinking–the sum total of what is in our collective heads–will propel us materially to the next, more socio-economically humane, level (though vested interests may make it a bloody event). Since accumulated knowledge and inventive thinking is a crucial part of Pogany’s evolutionary materialism, he understandably brings a vast number of ideas to the table for examination. He chews through them with vigor, from Karl Polanyi (a favorite) to Karl Marx (historically necessary), inviting the reader into his own head to observe his material processes–and, once there, to grow skeptical (has cultural evolution really “moderated the fierceness of competition among its own ranks”?), nod your head in agreement with the value of the economic transformation curve, or marvel that “life is autocatalytic entropy defiance.”
Richly inclusive and wonderfully hopeful, Pogany’s theories are dense with dark matter, but lively.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2006
ISBN: 0-595-41079-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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