A concise and expert primer on arms training.
A guide offers a radical reconsideration of arms training coupled with a discussion of bias in law enforcement.
Salomon makes the provocative argument that a thoughtless fidelity to training standards has become a liability in the cosmos of armed professions, including law enforcement and the military: “We should get rid of the notion that standards, in and of themselves, either comprise training or should be the objective of training.” Instead of preparing for “real-world performance,” shooters practice for an examination that is as arbitrary as it is inefficient. At the heart of the problem is limited resources—firing ranges are scarce and ammunition is expensive—and the fact that fears of liability result in a dearth of qualified instructors. Trainers are “deathly afraid” of potentially lethal accidents. The author recommends an approach, articulated at length in Salomon’s previous work, Building Shooters (2016), based on the “architecture and function of the human brain.” According to the author, there are three basic memory systems for human beings: short-term memory, long-term declarative memory, and long-term procedural memory. Only the last of these is accessed during times of intense stress, Salomon asserts, and so any training method must focus on this particular storehouse of information. In this series opener, the author’s expertise in arms training is beyond reproach, and his knowledge of the relevant literature on neuroscience is impressive, especially for a layperson. In addition, he draws intriguing—and timely—implications from the same neuroscience regarding debates about police bias that are both sober and thoughtful. And his prose is lucidly blunt and snappy: “Real-world events vary in innumerable ways, and the only consistent performance metric is who is still vertical after the fact.” This is a well-researched introduction to a complex set of issues, and given the contemporary debates regarding policing, the work may even interest general readers.
A concise and expert primer on arms training.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-952594-07-6
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Innovative Services and Solutions LLC
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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