Vargas Llosa reveals with enthusiasm and aplomb the political and social beliefs that have found homes in his work.
The celebrated author’s personal take on the evolution of his liberal ideas.
Vargas Llosa describes this thoughtful, reflective book as an autobiographical and intellectual road map to his journey from the “Marxism and Sartrean existentialism of my youth to the liberalism of my mature years.” The author laid his political beliefs on the line when he ran for president of Peru in 1987 and when he prominently spoke of defending liberal democracy in his Nobel speech in 2010. He returns to Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station as inspiration, seeking to do for liberalism what Wilson did for socialism. The map consists of biographies and detailed discussions of thinkers who helped shape Vargas Llosa’s political education. He begins with Adam Smith, the “father of liberalism,” focusing on the “oceanic” The Wealth of Nations, which shows how the free market “brings progress to nations,” fostering the “economic freedom [that] upholds and drives all other freedoms.” Vargas Llosa believes that Spain’s José Ortega y Gasset, the “most intelligent and elegant liberal philosophers of the twentieth century,” has been unjustly overlooked and deserves greater recognition. He admits that Friedrich von Hayek is one of the three modern thinkers to whom he owes the most, and Hayek’s last book, The Fatal Conceit (1988), is “one of the most important works of the twentieth century.” Thanks to The Open Society and Its Enemies, an “absolute masterpiece,” Karl Popper was the “most daring liberal thinker of his age” despite “opaque and meandering prose” and his hatred of TV. Vargas Llosa is also a staunch supporter of the “pragmatic realism and the reformist and liberal ideas” of Raymond Aron. The author concludes with Isaiah Berlin, the “extraordinarily erudite political thinker and social philosopher”; and Jean-François Revel, one of liberal culture’s “most talented and battle-hardened combatants.”
Vargas Llosa reveals with enthusiasm and aplomb the political and social beliefs that have found homes in his work.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-374-11805-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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