Can we save ourselves from ourselves? To judge by this well-researched book, it might be best not to put money on it.
First came the Garden of Eden. It’s been all downhill ever since.
In his latest book, Chasteen, the author of Americanos and Born in Blood and Fire, examines the consequences of the human transition from small bands of hunters and gatherers to large villages of agriculturalists—and now, megalopolises fueled by industry and commerce. While interpersonal violence isn’t unknown in those smaller societies, and while “Paleolithic life was really no paradise, even if it suited human beings, in some ways, more than the life we lead now,” when you put people into permanent houses and high population densities, the situation often gets worse: Farming begets warfare, in Chasteen’s schema, and war begets patriarchy and control. It took less than 1,000 years for farming societies to develop a class or caste hierarchy “dominated most often by a warrior nobility and a hereditary kingship.” From there, the author proceeds to examine the evolution of ever more powerful polities. Chasteen ventures some interesting observations—e.g., that Buddhism traveled east and not west from India because while China was receptive to new beliefs, lacking any formal state religion, Zoroastrian and Muslim Persia proved a powerful barrier. The author does not hesitate to suggest that the ongoing post–Cold War spread of consumer culture hasn’t done the planet much good. On that note, he considers Russia’s war on Ukraine against the context of an ever more apparent global climate crisis: “We can’t lift two fingers as a world community when it comes to saving the planet, it seems, but an international war with tanks and rockets? Now that is something we can relate to!” Given the track record of humankind since our metaphorical fall from grace, readers can be forgiven if they are pessimistic about the possibility of the world’s nations banding together to avert catastrophe.
Can we save ourselves from ourselves? To judge by this well-researched book, it might be best not to put money on it.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781324036920
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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