An informative and highly engaging exploration of an influential social status dynamic.
How a particular social phenomenon shapes our lives, prospects, and futures.
In modern society, according to UC Berkeley business professor Stuart, “anointment” refers to “a ubiquitous process in which a person or institution of high regard confers status on something or someone else explicitly or simply by association.” (The author readily acknowledges that he is one of the anointed himself.) A Rembrandt painting is considered magnitudes more valuable than an almost indistinguishable reproduction by a no-name artist. This is an example of the “Big Shift,” a term Stuart uses to describe one of the mental shortcuts that anointment allows us to make: We evaluate the worthiness of a person or object by the status or prestige of its affiliations rather than its inherent quality. Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, anointment contributes to inequality. Graduates of a particular elite institution may favor candidates with the same credentials when considering potential job applicants. Individuals who earn reputations as visionaries, such as Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, are often protected from the consequences of their bad behavior and are granted far more benefit of the doubt about their failures. People with low status, frequently members of underserved racial and social groups, lack the networks of anointed individuals that would allow them to gain higher status. However, the myth of American meritocracy persists among individuals of all status levels despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In a passage describing humans’ proclivity for rankings, Stuart writes: “Tripadvisor ranks hotels and restaurants. People magazine seems to rank everyone.” The author’s boxed summarizations of key points and his academically tinged sense of humor contribute to the approachability of this slim but thorough work. Given his thoroughness, Stuart’s rosy predictions in the closing chapter about how artificial intelligence will revolutionize and democratize human decision-making feel relatively underbaked. Still, his book on the whole ably outlines the necessity for deeper understanding of an intuitive and powerful human behavior.
An informative and highly engaging exploration of an influential social status dynamic.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668001875
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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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