Lively and impeccably written—a welcome addition to the way-the-world-works literature.
A spirited tour of six material things on which our lives depend.
Sky News economics editor Conway, an inhabitant of the “ethereal world” in which ideas and services are bought and sold, opens his account with an eye-opening visit to a Utah gold mine where an entire mountain range is being removed in the quest for earthly riches. That hugely destructive pit is a comparative scratch in the ground, though, compared to a vast Chilean copper mine that “can produce comfortably more copper each year…as the amount of gold produced by every mine on the planet since the beginning of time.” Gold is somewhat inconsequential, while copper is essential to electronics. So is sand, one of the six commodities Conway examines in rich detail without his prose ever sliding into the miasmas of the dismal science. Sand contains silicon, which yields computer chips and “the fiber optics from which the internet is woven.” Silicon combines with cement and asphalt to make buildings and roads; iron provides the infrastructure of the built material world; salt yields hydrogen chloride, another component of computer chips and even solar panels; and oil is implicated in just about everything, including greenhouse-grown vegetables that feed the world. Even in an energy and material regime weaned from fossil fuels, Conway argues, fossil fuels will play a part—and getting that weaning accomplished, he adds, “will mean building untold new energy capacity across the world: solar panels, wind turbines and nuclear plants, a rate humankind has never before achieved.” Yet, he adds at the conclusion of this erudite exploration, which ably describes how his chosen commodities interact, it’s not an impossibility, thanks to his sixth element: lithium, the basis for the batteries that may lead the way to a renewable energy future. Of course, copper and glass will be involved, too.
Lively and impeccably written—a welcome addition to the way-the-world-works literature.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780593534342
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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