A challenging, relevant, and thoughtful read.
In this nonfiction work, Saviano conducts a philosophical, sociological, and psychological exploration of how and why people have lost trust in the institutions that govern their lives.
In Book II of his “Collapse of Trust” series, the author begins by asserting that “public discussions of conspiracy belief often begin from a diagnosis of irrationality.” In other words, the usual premise is that people who develop conspiracy theories are operating from misinformation, “an error in reasoning,” or some other defect in judgment. “This book,” Saviano declares, “begins from a different premise. It asks what conditions make distrust reasonable.” The author examines the issue from the perspective of institutional fault. What are institutions (governmental, financial, industrial) doing—or not doing—to cause people to lose trust in them? Distrust, the author argues, begins with feelings of unease, the sense that information or answers to questions are incomplete. This unease grows into suspicion, creating a cognitive disturbance and feelings of betrayal. “Conspiracy theories,” Saviano posits, “reduce that discomfort by offering internally coherent stories that close explanatory gaps.” The problem is not limited to the United States; in addition to examples of domestic institutional betrayals that led to valid conspiracy allegations (such as the Tuskegee syphilis study conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972), the author provides case studies from Brazil, India, Russia, and Europe. This academic treatise is composed in a scholarly fashion, employing the language of the social sciences. Although Saviano provides introductory definitions for the terminology he uses, lay readers are likely to find the prose unnecessarily lengthy and cumbersome—too many sentences run for half a paragraph, and a bit of judicious cutting for the sake of brevity would make the work more accessible to a broader readership. Still, the subject matter is compelling and certainly timely, and the book has several engaging chapters, such as one on how to differentiate “between legitimate skepticism and harmful paranoia.” The work closes with a cautiously optimistic conclusion: “The alternative to trust is not chaos. It is disciplined coexistence under uncertainty.”
A challenging, relevant, and thoughtful read.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798999233653
Page Count: 220
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2026
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
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
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