Skillfully written intellectual entertainment—prime fodder for postmodern psychologists and New-Age thinkers alike.
Durable reportage on governmental and commercial attempts to influence and propagate national well-being.
British sociologist and political economist Davies (The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition, 2014) scrutinizes an increasingly desirous yet elusive commodity: human happiness. He asserts that proof of well-being lies in scientifically measured studies with verifiable data, not with advertisers and pharmaceutical companies “watching, incentivizing, prodding, optimizing and pre-empting us psychologically.” The author profiles 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham and discusses how his doctrine of utilitarianism might also be applied to modern theories of individual happiness. Davies believes a race has begun to discover and ultimately develop what motivates human psychology in order to apply methods of achieving contentment across a broad spectrum of societies. Spurred on by capitalism and strategically manipulated technology, influential corporate tastemakers have long sought to tap into (and capitalize on) the secrets of personal happiness by way of behavioral economics, advertising, and the often ethically dicey involuntary monitoring and calibration of human satisfaction. A section on how happiness quotients are actually measured—whether through a smile, a pulse rate, or a particularly impulsive purchase—makes for contemplative reading. Through neuroscientific research studies addressing everything from workplace satisfaction to the depression epidemic, Davies shares a wealth of relevant information that points to the vast marketing potential of commercializing the concept and achievement of universal human bliss and the “limitless pursuit of self-optimization.” Also significant is whether personal contentment can be bought, sold, managed, and manipulated via the global economic marketplace. If it hasn’t happened already, Davies writes, governmental and corporate entities are hard at work converting the concept of happiness into a “measurable, visible, improvable entity.”
Skillfully written intellectual entertainment—prime fodder for postmodern psychologists and New-Age thinkers alike.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78168-845-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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