Captivating, opinionated history from a knowledgeable source.
The bestselling British historian offers his thoughts on major disasters, including the current pandemic, with an emphasis on why humans handle them so badly.
After seeing his warnings about the severity of Covid-19 ignored in early 2020, Ferguson revived his interest in the role of disasters in world history. The result is this assertive, intensely researched, sometimes unconvincing, but always entertaining account. “Historians tend to gravitate toward the study of…extreme disasters, with a preference for the man-made varieties,” writes the author. “Yet they seldom reflect very deeply on their common properties.” With all disasters, the social context is crucial: A hurricane or earthquake is of no consequence unless there are people around. Perhaps most important of all, Ferguson emphasizes, these phenomena tend to follow “power laws” rather than the familiar normal distribution such as human heights. There is no average forest fire, stock market drop, or measles outbreak. Major catastrophes occur so rarely that few of us take the risk personally and continue to invest in risky stocks, settle in flood plains, and thrill at the beginning of the latest war. Historians follow every disaster with an explanation. Thus, they explain that the shocking 1914 outbreak of World War I was caused by decades of competition between Europe’s great powers. Ferguson disagrees, preferring Tolstoy’s view that human calamities are natural phenomena comparable to a hurricane. “Most disasters occur when a complex system goes critical,” writes the author, “usually as a result of some small perturbation.” After a handful of familiar examples (the Titanic, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, etc.), Ferguson returns to Covid, an ongoing preoccupation that he describes in superb detail. Unquestionably an economic disaster, in terms of lives lost, the author labels it a “medium-size disaster”—comparable to the 1957-1958 influenza pandemic rather than the epic 1918-1919 Spanish flu. Ferguson ends in September 2020, before the pandemic’s massive upswing, so future editions will require an addendum.
Captivating, opinionated history from a knowledgeable source.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-29737-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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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