A dispiriting but eye-opening hop down the QAnon rabbit hole, where plenty of literal madness lies.
When Trump tweets a typo, is it secret code? As this odd report from the land of conspiracy theory demonstrates, plenty of people think so.
NBC News investigative reporter Cook examines five families who have been swallowed up, in some way or another, by the outlandish claims of QAnon. It doesn’t take much to see that buying into the ideas that space lasers are causing forest fires, that Tom Hanks enjoys torturing children, and that pedophiliacs congregate in pizza parlors is an expression of mental illness. However, as the author recounts with considerable empathy, that illness is a kind of death by despair, one to which elderly and isolated people are especially vulnerable. In one instance, a widowed mother, emotionally broken, denounced her son for voting for “your beloved China Joe” instead of Trump, who she believed was going to orchestrate a massive roundup of Deep State personnel on December 22, 2020. In another case study, a woman in failing health came to believe that “vaccines didn’t just cause autism anymore,” but were part of a government conspiracy. Behind all of this misguided thinking are hucksters making a profit, whether selling horse medication as a cure for Covid-19 or survival kits for the zombie apocalypse. “In this regard,” writes Cook, “QAnon was a microcosm of the Trumpian Right: a more extreme and insular product of harmonized lies from right-wing politicians, media figures, and influencers”—and all with profit in mind. Hard reality—the loss of jobs, marriages, family, friends—can sometimes turn QAnon believers around. But overall, Cook concludes, “what we’re facing is as much a wellness crisis as it is a disinformation crisis,” one that will require an army of therapists to deal with.
A dispiriting but eye-opening hop down the QAnon rabbit hole, where plenty of literal madness lies.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593443255
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
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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
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