A joyful road map away from a polarized, selfish society to the hopeful, humane place where we should be.
An inspiring, timely book about ways to bring out the best in people rather than focusing on the worst.
We are living in an age of monetized anger, writes Anderson, who’s helped launch more than 100 magazines. If we don’t change course soon, the disease will be terminal. Thankfully, the author offers a remarkably straightforward remedy: Think less about commerce and more about simple, grassroots generosity. As the head of the TED organization, Anderson has lived the idea, bringing interesting and useful ideas to millions of people for free. In this uplifting book, the author examines how social media has become a maze of algorithms designed to glue people to screens in a fog of simmering resentment, unwilling to even talk to strangers, let alone help them. Yet signs of change do exist, and Anderson recounts stories of people acting generously—the hairdresser who started to give free cuts to homeless people or the anonymous donors who distributed substantial grants to help good causes. Video records of these incidents and many similar ones were circulated online; in numerous cases, people who watched them were inspired to become generous themselves, volunteering at or making a donation to a worthy organization. Anderson sees this pattern as proof that social media can be a positive force—and that many people want to be generous. He cites research showing that those who perform real-world generous acts are happier than self-centered people who live online. “Whether our collective future is a good one or not depends largely on whether the majority of people give more to the world than they take from it,” he writes, continuing, “Generosity is a key ingredient for a contented life.”
A joyful road map away from a polarized, selfish society to the hopeful, humane place where we should be.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593727553
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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 fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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