A thoughtful conjecture on how the geopolitical situation might look in 2050.
A work of speculative history attempts to describe the mid-21st-century world.
If aliens were to observe planet Earth in 2050, what would they see? Would it make them want to contact humans, or would they decide to stay away, leaving the inhabitants to their own inevitable self-destruction? With this book, Unarce (Silicon Valley Secrets, 2017, etc.) plays out a few possible scenarios of what the world might look like in a little over 30 years, encouraging readers to take an alien’s-eye view of each situation and evaluate whether it represents the Earth they wish to project to the stars. Will they like what they see? What if they don’t? “Isn’t it time that we came up with a new paradigm of evolution and growth on this planet?” asks the author in his preface. “Before it’s too late?” Unarce imagines a world of unchecked climate change, in which food and water shortages coupled with rising sea levels lead to a hundred million deaths in the developing world. He also outlines possible climate change survival strategies as proposed by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, including the Techno Garden (a world of technologically linked, highly engineered ecosystems) and the Adapting Mosaic (a realm of diverse, regionally managed ecosystems). He imagines a planet with mega-regions (groups of city-centered metro areas that coordinate the movement of resources and the distribution of population), where both military might and economic power determine global hegemony. The author also makes predictions as to which nations and trading alliances will take center stage in the near future, from BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) to Chindia (China and India) to ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) to CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa). Unarce writes in a clear though technical prose that assumes readers are familiar with the relevant concepts of international economics, demography, and climate change: “More than ever, the world in 2050 is driven by materialism: all around the globe, the paradigm of quantitative growth continues to reign supreme, enabling a new level of consumption to cater to the desire for material possessions.” He cites a number of sources for the statistics that he provides, and this data, coupled with arguments from various organizations that study these issues, directs the majority of the book’s ideas. The alien framing device is mostly irrelevant to the two topics Unarce is most interested in addressing: climate change and the West’s declining hegemony in global politics. The volume is not written from an America-centric perspective, however. The author takes on each region of the globe in turn, evaluating its probable fortunes in the coming decades. He takes care to reiterate that the inhabitants of developing countries will be the greatest victims of climate change while those of the First World have the utmost power to curb its effects. For a speculative work, this is not as far-fetched a volume as one might suspect from the premise. Unarce shows that the effects of global warming are frightfully predictable. The unknown factor is how leaders decide to deal (or not deal) with the problem.
A thoughtful conjecture on how the geopolitical situation might look in 2050.Pub Date: May 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5212-9526-7
Page Count: 301
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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