A refreshingly rosy assessment of how far many of us have come from the days when life was uniformly nasty, brutish, and...
Cato Institute senior fellow Norberg (Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation with Home Ownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis, 2009, etc.) surveys human history and finds “things have been getting better—overwhelmingly so.”
In this brightly written, upbeat book, the Swedish author blends facts, anecdotes, and official statistics to describe “humanity’s triumph” in achieving the present unparalleled level of global living standards. By virtually every measure—food, sanitation, life expectancy, poverty, violence, the environment, literacy, freedom, equality, the conditions of childhood—life has improved for most people, writes the author. Much of the progress stems from 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers, who believed “the world could steadily improve if reason was set free,” thereby encouraging innovation and problem-solving. Major breakthroughs have fed upon one another: better access to food and health care, for example, have made it possible to work more and ensured “even better nutrition and even better health.” Growths in wealth, knowledge, trade, and technology have been chief animating forces. As a result, humanity has enjoyed a remarkable array of life improvements, often overlooked in our daily preoccupation with bad news: average life expectancy in the world has gone from 31 years in 1900 to 71 today. Malnutrition in Peru has declined by 76 percent since 1990. Global literacy jumped from 21 percent in 1900 to 86 percent in 2015. Poverty dropped by 24 percent in India between 1993 and 2012. Slavery, which existed worldwide in 1800, has been formally banned everywhere. Norberg reminds us that throughout history, parents often had to bury their children. He notes certain individuals have played key roles: Maurice Hilleman, developer of the measles vaccine, is among those who saved the most lives in history. While acknowledging the mayhem, hunger, and poverty still facing much of the world, the author remains optimistic that human ingenuity will prevail in shaping the future.
A refreshingly rosy assessment of how far many of us have come from the days when life was uniformly nasty, brutish, and short.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78074-950-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
