An intriguing if bet-hedging work of futurology that calls into question the whole business of futurology itself.
A gimlet-eyed look at the promises of technology and futurists past.
If people were to live to be 1,000, and if one of them committed some heinous crime, would it be just for a life sentence to last multiple centuries? Thus one of the thought experiments in the latest by the Novellas, a follow-up to The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. The authors argue that while we have made tremendous progress in technology in the past half-century, it’s been in arenas that we didn’t quite expect: not the cure for cancer or the solution to climate change but instead fun apps to distract us from the world. “I drive to work in a car that would most likely seem ordinary to a driver from the 1950s,” write the authors, “but they would likely be blown away by my GPS and entertainment system.” That we might expect different comes from the overselling of a gleaming future by science fiction—e.g., the promise in 2001 that we would have traveled to Jupiter two decades ago or the projection that we’d have so much leisure time that we’d all become masters of our various corners of the universe. Instead, as the authors note, modern life proves “the deep philosophical principle that shit happens,” with most of us incapable of seeing it coming. The authors venture a few predictions of their own, including the expansion of robotics and the mechanization of biology, creating replacement parts within our bodies that are far more effective than the current titanium knees and hips. “But why limit ourselves to the original body plan?” he rejoins. “We can even add extra limbs.” One thing may be certain: If we live forever or very nearly so as “genetically modified cyborgs,” there won’t be much need for children—so maybe don’t buy stock in diaper manufacturers.
An intriguing if bet-hedging work of futurology that calls into question the whole business of futurology itself.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-538-70954-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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