Plus ça change? No, the more it changes, the weirder the world gets. For policy wonks with an eye toward the middle term,...
Salutary futuristic reading for those still inclined to “use a mechanical way of thinking in an age of complexity.”
Has there ever been an age without complexity and confusion? Probably not. However, as Kissinger Associates CEO Ramo (The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It, 2009, etc.) writes, this is a time of disruption that lends itself to “seventh sense” thinking—in less trendy terms, the ability to discern how things connect to other things in nodes and networks, “to look at any object and see the way in which it is changed by connection.” These networks can be benign; they can be useful, as in digitized library connections; and they can be harmful, in part owing to the “hyperdense concentrations of power” that are produced by networks, introducing opportunities for chaos and complexity into situations that are already fraught with them. Ramo quotes approvingly from the philosopher Paul Virilio in this regard: “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.” Shipwrecks are all around us, as witness the network that is the Islamic State group, something that old-school thinking might imagine can be fought by air forces and bunker-buster bombs but that the Seventh Sensible would know requires different tools for dismantling. Ramo is sometimes vague but sometimes profound in a postmodern way that’s not the usual stuff of Washington think tanks: we have been busy “murdering the exotic,” he writes, with our first-world technologies and high-speed Internet connections, so we shouldn’t be surprised when “from time to time, the exotic shows up and murders us right back.” It all makes for provocative reading, and if the author is light on specifics, he offers plenty of interesting scenarios for such things as global power shifts, AI–enabled weapons systems, and the like.
Plus ça change? No, the more it changes, the weirder the world gets. For policy wonks with an eye toward the middle term, Ramo provides a good effort to make sense of it all.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-28506-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2016
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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