Fresh insights about the ways we understand reality.
Why humans need to tell new stories.
Literary scholar Gottschall, who celebrated humans’ propensity for telling tales in The Storytelling Animal, now considers ways stories “sway us for the worse.” Why, he asks, thinking of conspiracy stories (which are not, he insists, theories), climate change deniers, and news stories that produce feelings of despair, “do stories seem to be driving our species mad?” Given the ubiquity of stories in every culture and their potential to create conflict, he focuses his thoughtful and entertaining investigation on a critical question: “How can we save the world from stories?” Drawing on philosophy (Plato is a recurring figure), psychology, anthropology, neurobiology, history, and literature and interweaving personal anecdotes and snippets of popular culture, Gottschall acknowledges that stories have powerful emotional impact. From ancient times, they emerged “as a tool of tribal cohesion and competition,” structured with a “universal grammar” that is “paranoid and vindictive”: Characters try to solve predicaments, facing trouble and often a clearly defined villain. Such stories generate empathy for the characters in peril while creating a kind of “moral blindness” regarding villains. This paradigm, Gottschall argues, shapes our stories about society, politics, and even history, “a genre of speculative narrative that projects our current obsessions onto the past.” Rather than depict Nazis or White supremacists as villains, Gottschall suggests that they were not “worse people than us” but had the “moral misfortune” of being born into cultures which mistakenly defined bad as good. When we villainize, he warns, we dehumanize, sinking into sanctimony and hate. With “folk tales” erupting and spreading “with incredible speed and ease on the internet” and with a political figure he dubs the Big Blare reigning as a supreme storyteller, Gottschall exhorts readers to become aware of storytelling biases and to learn to tell a story “where we are protagonists on the same quest.”
Fresh insights about the ways we understand reality.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5416-4596-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
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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