An enjoyable, important update on an enigmatic economic giant.
In this natural follow-up to Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China (2008), Atlantic correspondent Fallows analyzes the problems and promises of China’s economic development through an examination of the efforts to create a world-class aerospace industry.
With its unprecedented manufacturing prowess, China has become a world economic power. But how real and sustainable is the development? The test, writes the author, is how well China succeeds in its current effort to build an aerospace industry, to which the Chinese government has pledged $230 billion. “If China can succeed fully in aerospace,” writes Fallows, “then in principle there is very little it cannot do.” However, this is no easy task. It is one thing to assemble iPhones, quite another to build an industry of the complexity of aerospace. Fallows ably guides readers through this complexity: developing internationally recognized standards of safety and inspection, ensuring adequate air space above China for a busy airline industry, developing and manufacturing airplanes, and their millions of components, that can compete with established manufacturers such as Boeing and Airbus. In this effort, Fallows sees both the broad positive and negative features of Chinese society. While China’s economy at its best is marked by an anarchic spontaneity of entrepreneurial energy, this energy is often checked by a state apparatus obsessed with monitoring and controlling it. If the government will not allow open Internet access, it cannot easily open up the skies to commercial flights. The Chinese military owns the country’s airspace, with only a few narrow corridors open for commercial flights into China’s major cities. With precise yet accessible language, Fallows discusses a variety of contradictions in China, revealing much more about it than its prospects as an aerospace power.
An enjoyable, important update on an enigmatic economic giant.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-375-42211-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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
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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