A convincing, if occasionally unwieldy, guidebook for a better future.
An educator’s vision for healing America’s traumatic past and politically fractured present.
A classroom teacher for more than two decades, Marra is the co-founder of the Fully Human at Work organization, which provides interdisciplinary workshops on cultivating a more conscientious and thoughtful culture in Americans’ relationships within the workplace and with fellow citizens more broadly. This book, which complements the organization’s purpose, provides a theoretical and analytical perspective on American history and its current state of sociopolitical division. The election of Donald Trump in 2016, the author notes, led many Americans to question prevailing narratives about democracy and equality in the U.S. Yet as appalling as Trump was to many Americans, according to Marra, he embodied a “collective American Shadow” that revealed “the worst of ourselves” and a larger history of American “ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, [and] bullying.” The book is divided into three parts; the first section provides historical and psychological context and commentary on the history and persistence of this “Shadow.” Part 2 centers on the whitewashed narratives Americans have told themselves, which minimize the mistreatment of women, African Americans, and Indigenous peoples. Despite these historic wrongs, which the author connects to systemic issues that still impact the present, the book is optimistic in tone, emphasizing hope in the possibility of national healing. To this end, its final section centers on “strategies, tactics, practices, and ways of being” that provide practical actions that individuals can make in their own lives to foster collective healing. The author of multiple books of poetry and inspirational nonfiction, Marra is well versed in classical literature, philosophy, and history, and this work is full of references to Jungian philosophy, the writing of feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft, and often marginalized historical events. Despite a sophisticated presentation of critical theory, U.S. history, and philosophy, the book carefully balances nuance with accessibility and practical application. Still, at 500-plus pages, the book would benefit from a trim.
A convincing, if occasionally unwieldy, guidebook for a better future.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9862690-1-6
Page Count: 515
Publisher: From the Heart Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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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