With something to ponder on every page, a bracing exhortation to do right by the people of centuries to come.
Scottish ethicist and Oxford professor MacAskill urges that those alive today consider the lingering effects of their carbon-footprint–deepening actions.
“Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better,” writes the author in a combination of thought experiment and reader-friendly white paper. His future is “big,” extending millions of years out, which is perhaps touchingly optimistic given the long-standing habit of mammalian species to disappear after a million years or so. The bigness of that future is what has prompted MacAskill to propound “longtermism,” with its challenging guiding idea that we owe it to people we will never see and whom we may or may not have propagated (the choice for childlessness figures in the argument) to improve their chances of survival. The author identifies a daunting array of modern threats. One is climate change; another is the ever present threat of nuclear war, heightened after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Optimistic again, MacAskill suggests that there are ways we can choose peace and avert the worst effects of climate change by “decarbonizing,” which he calls a “proof of concept for longtermism…against which other potential actions can be compared.” There are other, less obvious threats that worry the author. For example, what might happen if the artificial intelligence of the present is programmed in such a way that it promotes “bad-value lock-in” and thereby makes inevitable a perpetual fascist world government in the future? Throughout, MacAskill brings expansive ideas. He examines the process of history-shifting “value change” by considering changing attitudes toward human slavery. On a more personal scale, he advocates vegetarianism, and he observes that not having children may mean an absence of kids with good values who “can be change makers who help create a better future.”
With something to ponder on every page, a bracing exhortation to do right by the people of centuries to come.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5416-1862-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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