Thought-provoking, somewhat wonky reading for those looking beyond the current plague toward future geopolitical trends.
A broad-ranging critique of the failure of the world’s leading states to respond effectively to the pandemic.
The pandemic has exposed many things, write Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Micklethwait and Economist columnist Wooldridge, especially the effectiveness of governments in trying to do something about it. “The arrival of the virus was like an examination of state capacity,” they write, and very few Western governments performed well (Germany, Switzerland, and Greece among them). Better still were nations in Asia: Though China’s initial response was somewhat confused, it borrowed epidemiological regimes from Singapore, perhaps the most successful state in Asia. Though the Chinese communist state is riddled with inefficiencies and corruption, “alongside the thuggish dictatorship there is another China: one that studies where government works and where it doesn’t; that is recruiting a cadre of highly-trained administrators and monitoring them through the Party’s Organizational Department.” These people are called into account every day while Western bureaucrats shunt off responsibility—which all plays into the hands of the authoritarians of the West, with Donald Trump leading the way in incompetency. Trump, with Boris Johnson in the U.K., botches everything to which he turns his hand; write the authors, “Trump and Johnson are undermining the idea that statecraft is a serious business; instead they have treated it as a branch of mass entertainment.” The pandemic may give faltering states the opportunity to retool—and to clean house. The authors decry excessive regulation that stifles innovation as well as a political culture driven by lawyers, as in the U.S., rather than by scientists and engineers, as in China. More likely, therefore, the pandemic, coupled with the ineptitude of Trump and company, will have a broad effect on power dynamics: “in terms of geopolitics, the crisis has left the West weaker and Asia stronger.”
Thought-provoking, somewhat wonky reading for those looking beyond the current plague toward future geopolitical trends.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-306529-1
Page Count: 112
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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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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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