A bold but not always appealing blueprint for the future.
A new treatise that urges educational overhaul, political inequality, and atheism as potential strategies for revitalizing civilization.
Software engineer and product manager Wilensky surveys fundamental aspects of modern society that he feels are desperately in need of a rethink. Chief among them, he asserts, is an educational system that teaches children nothing but conformism and soon-to-be-forgotten factoids; instead, he argues, instructors should stimulate kids’ curiosity and creativity, teach them critical thinking skills, and raise them to be “thinking machines” who “reason reflexively.” Wilensky also condemns religious belief as the fountainhead of irrationality, intolerance, conflict, and so much “false and often foul doctrine” that “religious inculcation…of young children is equivalent to child abuse.” To counter such conformism, he recommends “changing the environment” so that everything children are exposed to “reflects in some way a worldview embracing science and reason, while at the same time rejecting religion and belief in the supernatural.” The author also takes issue with one-person-one-vote democracy, which he says yields a “mediocracy” in which ignorant people are manipulated into electing corrupt hacks. Wilensky presents his opinions in lucid, plainspoken, but high-minded prose: “It may sound obvious, but we need to make a conscious effort at every turn of our lives to be more virtuous, compassionate human beings.” He offers some engaging explanations of complex concepts, such as the Darwinian evolution of human moral intuition and the falseness of unfalsifiable arguments, and he explores some imaginative potential reforms, such as teaching all kids chess and debate skills to sharpen their wits. Sometimes, though, Wilensky’s drive to optimize society launches into dystopian notions that many readers will perceive as incompatible with freedom, such as a requirement to obtain a parenting license to have children and an elitist electoral system in which a so-called superb class of voters, who score high on critical-thinking tests, have votes that count more than those of people the author calls “subpar.” Such ideas are likely to strike readers as alienating and even frightening.
A bold but not always appealing blueprint for the future.Pub Date: today
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 202
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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