A convincing, if occasionally unwieldy, guidebook for a better future.
An educator’s vision for healing America’s traumatic past and politically fractured present.
A classroom teacher for more than two decades, Marra is the co-founder of the Fully Human at Work organization, which provides interdisciplinary workshops on cultivating a more conscientious and thoughtful culture in Americans’ relationships within the workplace and with fellow citizens more broadly. This book, which complements the organization’s purpose, provides a theoretical and analytical perspective on American history and its current state of sociopolitical division. The election of Donald Trump in 2016, the author notes, led many Americans to question prevailing narratives about democracy and equality in the U.S. Yet as appalling as Trump was to many Americans, according to Marra, he embodied a “collective American Shadow” that revealed “the worst of ourselves” and a larger history of American “ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, [and] bullying.” The book is divided into three parts; the first section provides historical and psychological context and commentary on the history and persistence of this “Shadow.” Part 2 centers on the whitewashed narratives Americans have told themselves, which minimize the mistreatment of women, African Americans, and Indigenous peoples. Despite these historic wrongs, which the author connects to systemic issues that still impact the present, the book is optimistic in tone, emphasizing hope in the possibility of national healing. To this end, its final section centers on “strategies, tactics, practices, and ways of being” that provide practical actions that individuals can make in their own lives to foster collective healing. The author of multiple books of poetry and inspirational nonfiction, Marra is well versed in classical literature, philosophy, and history, and this work is full of references to Jungian philosophy, the writing of feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft, and often marginalized historical events. Despite a sophisticated presentation of critical theory, U.S. history, and philosophy, the book carefully balances nuance with accessibility and practical application. Still, at 500-plus pages, the book would benefit from a trim.
A convincing, if occasionally unwieldy, guidebook for a better future.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9862690-1-6
Page Count: 515
Publisher: From the Heart Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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