A fitting final chapter in the canon of an innovative psychologist.
An acclaimed psychologist’s magnum opus.
Stanford University professor Robert Ornstein’s 1972 book, The Psychology of Consciousness, was the subject of long-form reviews and analysis in the New Yorker, Time, and other national publications. The groundbreaking work provided fresh, scientifically based answers to how the evolution of the brain and consciousness aligned with human spirituality. Nearly a half-century and dozens of books later, the author, who died in 2018, offers readers this final, posthumously published work—the only one co-written with his wife, Sally. Ornstein notes in the preface that it is “the book I was waiting for,” calling it a “sequel” to his best-known work. He updates his past thesis with later findings in the fields of psychology and neuroscience and further develops his self-described “radical conclusion” that what humanity has “experienced as ‘God’ is a development and extension of consciousness.” From primordial shamans who introduced humanity to the first notion of a deity (or, in the book’s parlance, “God 1.0”) to the development of a monotheistic, omnipotent God in Abrahamic religions (“God 3.0”), humans have “tried to transcend normal existence” in a constant endeavor to unravel the mystery of life and death, he asserts. This book carefully balances readability and scientific complexity in its quest to find explanations for the near ubiquity of spirituality in humanity’s history, and the author displays a firm command of information regarding world religion, secular history, and cutting-edge science and psychological theory, as evidenced through extensive endnotes. It also tackles distinctly modern questions, such as why does religion make a rational species like Homo sapiens “do such weird things?” The book’s copious introductory materials are a bit hagiographic in their treatment of Ornstein’s legacy, but its main chapters deliver an effective, timely, and apropos conclusion to his published works. Particularly poignant is its final section, which calls for humankind to “move beyond beliefs” and “to bring up our children to identify with humanity itself.”
A fitting final chapter in the canon of an innovative psychologist.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-949358-99-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Malor Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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