A tiresome recitation but just the thing for the Sinophobes in the audience.
Shrill denunciation of the cozy relationship America’s technological, financial, and political “elites” enjoy with China.
Name a prominent newsmaker, and Schweizer—who joined forces with Steve Bannon in 2012 to create the Government Accountability Institute, with financing by hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, of Cambridge Analytica infamy—finds a money trail leading to China. Recognizing that many of these wealthy and powerful individuals subscribed to the view that China would liberalize with the relaxation of government controls over the market, Schweizer counters that instead, Beijing “has become more aggressive and repressive.” China has always courted wealth-seekers from the West, who act as agents of technology transfer, lobbyists, and influencers. Not only is the Chinese government brutal, writes the author, but it has also committed to overtaking the U.S. economically by 2050. He adds, “American elites featured in this book are in various ways feeding the beast that would make this nightmare a reality.” Bill Gates, Nancy Pelosi, Hunter and Joe Biden, Tony Blinken, and Mitch McConnell are among the figures Schweizer indignantly calls to account as agents of America’s demise. The author clearly comes from the right—the first person he thanks in his acknowledgments is Parler/Breitbart News funder Rebekah Mercer—but that doesn’t keep him from including a few Trump administration officials in his rogues’ gallery, including ambassador to China Terry Branstad and former transportation secretary Elaine Chao. Still, it’s telling that much of his fire is aimed at the Bush family, from both Georges to Neil and Jeb, all anathema to the Trump set, and that Trump himself gets a pass—despite all his wheeling and dealing with and admiration for totalitarian regimes up and down the Silk Road. “Whether the reader likes [Trump] or not,” writes the author, “there can be little doubt that he saw the challenge posed by China clearly and moved America in a positive direction to confront it.”
A tiresome recitation but just the thing for the Sinophobes in the audience.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-321169-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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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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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