A smart but dense and demanding interdisciplinary study of global friction.
California psychotherapist Gibbs blends historical analysis, social commentary, and psychology in this exploration of post-9/11 geopolitics.
Prevailing explanations of the tension between Western and Islamist governments often refer to a “clash of civilizations,” tribalism, or fanaticism, but the author proposes a deeper psychological answer: an inherited loyalty to preconstructed identities. These group identifications (or “semistructured ways of being”) are often manifest through what Gibbs refers to as “faiths,” whether they’re religious or secular (such as notions of the American dream). The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent War on Terror, per the book, are thus best understood as a “deadly dance” between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in which “clashes supplanted reason, dialogue, and progress and fed vicious cycles of escalating, intolerant division.” The book’s early chapters provide a theoretical and philosophical basis for the author’s assertions on the formation of identity; its midsection offers chapter-length explorations of Christianity, Judaism and Zionism, and Islam. Much of its astute analysis provides a sound historical foundation, noting, for instance, the varied contexts that shape Jewish identity, including religious conviction and millennia of persecution. The volume similarly offers a psychological explanation for the resurgence of fanaticism and prejudice, globally and domestically, over the past two decades as it explores the “unconscious compulsions” that result from people’s “unwitting identification” with inherited identities. This interdisciplinary methodology is reflected in the book’s extensive references to sources that include the work of Enlightenment philosophers and contemporary historians. At more than 450 pages in length, this tome requires commitment, and it also presupposes that readers have a basic understanding of a range of topics, ranging from Cartesian philosophy to postmodernism. Overall, the author’s verbose style and his proclivity toward academic jargon occasionally obfuscate, rather than clarify, the book’s sound theoretical underpinnings. But Gibbs, who has an undergraduate degree in history from Princeton University and an advanced degree in clinical psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies, offers a well-researched, nuanced perspective that doesn’t simplify the complexities of recent history.
A smart but dense and demanding interdisciplinary study of global friction.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9783838217666
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Ibidem Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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