A useful primer for those determined to make waves for a good cause.
Sit down and don’t make trouble—or else read this book.
According to Kashdan, a professor of psychology, it’s important to question authority and to take a stance of “principled insubordination, a brand of deviance intended to improve society with a minimal amount of secondary harm”—to subject received wisdom and things as they are to cross-examination. The principled part is significant. Being a rebel without a clue is useless, while being principled in rebelliousness “is vital for improving society.” In a text full of psychological theories and the results of telling experiments, Kashdan examines the many ways by which we lull ourselves into accepting the status quo. Perhaps surprisingly, he notes that “disadvantaged people often do just as much (or more) to affirm a system’s validity than those who occupied privileged positions within the same system.” Indeed, “people will go to bizarre lengths to rationalize and protect a social system that harms them.” Thus the recent rise of authoritarianism, which surely begs for people who’ll say no against all those people who’ll say yes. Learning how to say no, though, requires work. Kashdan identifies pitfalls such as status quo bias, confirmation bias (seeking evidence for what you believe and ignoring what doesn’t support your view), and the hope that submission will somehow lead to a higher social or economic class. There’s also projection bias, by which we “think others tend to share our preferences, beliefs, and behaviors more than they actually do.” This often produces martyrs instead of rebels. The author counsels taking all this information with as little stress and as much self-care as possible while being brave in the face of conformity and incuriosity. Ultimately, he writes, we must commit to “raising a new generation of youth who feel emboldened to disagree, defy, and deviate from problematic norms and standards.”
A useful primer for those determined to make waves for a good cause.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-42088-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
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
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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