A survey of population studies that is insightful, persuasive, and unfailingly humane.
Exploring our complex genetic and cultural heritage.
Zalloua, a Lebanese-born population geneticist, uses the ancient crossroads of the Levant as his touchstone, demonstrating not only how the world’s arbitrary geographical divisions tell only a small part of humanity’s origin story, but how the very concept of East versus West is equally artificial and misguided. “Do not look for DNA to tell you who you really are and where you belong. It is a fallacy!” says Zalloua, a scholar at Khalifa University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Zalloua skewers the commercial fad of genetic ancestry testing as grossly oversimplified, its purveyors using such terms as “origin,” “ethnicity,” “identity,” “heritage,” and “race” interchangeably, “with little or no attention given to the complexities and dynamics that underlie these concepts.” Writing with economy and authority, Zalloua believes this disregards the vastly more important cultural attributes that constitute the core of someone’s heritage. An identity is a “basket of memories and collectibles” continually added to and carried wherever one goes, an ever-evolving concept shaped by events, exposure, and interactions. There are no tests that can define “origin.” The author argues that while we cannot ignore genetics, we must look beyond it to the forces of migration and the intermingling of cultures, among other factors at play. His intermittent forays into detailed genetic markers and terminology can get a bit heavy going for the layperson, but Zalloua can also be profoundly personal, writing with verve and feeling, even as he provides capsule histories of African and eastern Mediterranean communities and startling evidence that upends many of the most treasured assumptions about our cultural identities.
A survey of population studies that is insightful, persuasive, and unfailingly humane.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593730904
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
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
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
