A spirited indictment of the American obsession with innovation.
Worshipping the twin gods of creativity and innovation may have doomed the American democratic experiment.
Cultural and political analyst Frank (What’s the Matter With Kansas?, 2004, etc.) excoriates the disastrous results of the American love affair with “innovation.” In the postwar United States, creativity (the inventions of the human mind) became identified with innovation (the relentless push for novelty). This conflation, he argues, buttressed political elites but did not improve the nation’s economy, benefiting the wealthy while taking jobs away from the poor. The trouble began with the dubious teachings of super-salesman Alex F. Osborn of the New York advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, who in Applied Imagination (1953) declared that creativity was universal. Over the next few decades, it became anything but that. With music and the liberal arts in “free-fall” today and manufacturing largely moved offshore, the U.S. has morphed into, Frank writes, “a postindustrial plutocracy in which Silicon Valley billionaires stride the earth like lords of creation, starting bespoke political movements and launching stuff into space.” It’s hard to finger specific culprits, but he devotes probing chapters to presidents and other politicians, on the right as well as the left, who, in the name of innovation, elevated software-makers, deregulated banks, cut taxes for the rich, built lifestyle “playgrounds” for yuppies in derelict cities, and reconfigured universities as incubators of new businesses (thus, sending tuition spiraling “upward into the stratosphere”). While some perpetrators of the creativity con might claim noble intentions, its willing beneficiaries can’t. The author mentions Elizabeth Holmes, whose sham blood-testing company Theranos coasted to short-lived success on the fraudulent wings of innovation-speak. A pithy and entertaining writer, Frank has a special talent for the trenchant quip: “The amount of high‑IQ brilliance that has gone into preventing farmers from repairing their own machinery would probably be enough to power several Manhattan Projects.” Long on condemnation and, given the scale of the problem, short on advice, this alarming book offers no prescriptions for the future but teaches readers to be wary whenever someone wields the C-word.
A spirited indictment of the American obsession with innovation.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593657539
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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