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
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
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
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