A savvy contribution to current debates.
What good is fiction?
Journalist Gold makes an incisive book debut with a thoughtful, often witty, examination of the causes and consequences of banning novels. “Most of the time,” she writes, “when we get anxious about the effects of fiction, we’re worried about mimetic responses—not so much from ourselves but from other people.” From ancient Greece to present-day America, book banners claim that they are protecting readers from ideas about reality that would harm them or undermine the community’s values. To Plato, for example, tales of gods behaving badly were “always endorsement and a social license for bad behavior.” Gold skewers the justification used by right-wingers that readers—especially children—will mistake a story for reality, “and that this mistake will lead them into unhealthy or disreputable situations.” “Cancel culture,” Gold contends, though not as virulent as outright banning, arises from the same “misguided presumptions” about fiction’s insidious power. For Gold, the crucial question is this: “How much can we expect of art and entertainment to fix our problems with reality, especially under our current economic and political system?” Gold refutes assertions from the left that “viewing and promoting something that the far right dislikes” is “a political act in itself,” and a virtuous act, at that. Reading about climate change, she reminds readers, doesn’t stop global warming. Gold looks at sci-fi, video games, movies, and TV to argue that media companies produce what is in their “financial best interest.” If an anti-capitalist novel were published, she writes, “it would just be a novel: it wouldn’t affect capitalism one way or another.” Still, Gold extols the impact of fiction: “We’re transformed by great writing,” she claims, “not beyond our own powers and capabilities but into them.”
A savvy contribution to current debates.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781593767709
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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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