A thorough yet elitist program for Saudi Arabia’s economic revitalization centered on scientific development.
A professor offers a comprehensive plan for the revival of Saudi Arabia’s research and innovation sector.
Al-Shamsi, a professor of civil engineering at Riyadh’s King Abdulaziz City for Science & Technology, begins his work by harkening back to Islam’s golden age. From Cordoba to Baghdad, Muslims exported scientific breakthroughs across Europe, Asia, and Africa. With God’s help and a remodeling of Saudi Arabia’s national research and innovation system, he hopes that Muslims can again lead the world in exporting significant scientific advances. One of the biggest obstacles the author sees is the country’s current system of funding subcontractors to conduct research. Far too often, subcontractors divert their funding to foreign researchers and academic institutions for self-promotion and publication in prestigious international scientific journals. This undermines the Saudi research and development system by using limited government money to support foreign institutions. Moreover, despite thriving Saudi petrochemical, oil, and date industries, foreign governments and businesses not only manufacture their “entire production lines,” but also continue to wield influence by controlling the technical expertise necessary to maintain them. This reliance on foreign nations for technology and expertise also applies to the Saudi military. For Al-Shamsi, economic independence and homeland security will only be guaranteed by a new era of Arab innovation that serves the interests not just of individual researchers, but the nation as well. The author proposes dozens of intriguing ideas on how the Saudi government can foster homegrown innovation. These include the creation of new government councils that report directly to the prime minister, new patent laws and greater protections on intellectual property, and the funding of Saudi industrial expositions and scientific journals. Overflowing with national pride, this book will surely appeal to anyone interested in internal reform revolving around economic progress in the Arab world. But while the benefits of a scientific revolution may ultimately trickle down to the masses, the work’s target audience comprises government and business leaders. Reforms in human and civil rights are noticeably absent from a volume that focuses on reestablishing Saudi Arabia as an innovator of scientific ideas.
A thorough yet elitist program for Saudi Arabia’s economic revitalization centered on scientific development.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-71447-820-0
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Blurb
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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