A fun, informative read that puts the pop into popular science.
An entertaining illustrated assessment of space settlement.
This book is, to put it simply, a romp. The Weinersmiths published a similar book in 2017, Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything, and their latest deals with the practical problems of creating settlements in space. The authors, self-described "space geeks” who “love visionary plans for a glorious future,” collected a huge amount of research material for the project. They started out as optimistic about the prospects for space colonies, but the more they learned, the more they understood the staggering resource costs and the complex technical problems. Much of the recent interest in space settlements stems from the shrinking costs of putting satellites into low orbit, but this does not transfer into the cost of moving the needed materials to the moon, Mars, a space station, or another planet. Moreover, research into the long-term effects of low gravity on human biology does not bode well. The Weinersmiths have a good time discussing the difficulty of human reproduction in non-Earth environments, but for a settlement meant to be self-sustaining, it would be a real issue. An even more difficult question involves the laws that would apply, as existing treaties are clearly outdated. Despite the optimism of SF writers and the current crop of adventurous billionaires, the authors believe that space settlements would probably replicate the conflicts and divisions of Earth-bound societies: Humans, after all, remain human. Though the authors strike a humorous tone, they don’t neglect serious topics, and they do believe that one day space will be colonized. However, the timeline is centuries rather than decades, and there must be more focus on the practical realities than on visionary hyperbole. One way or another, this book has a lot to offer.
A fun, informative read that puts the pop into popular science.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781984881724
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
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