Thoroughly inclusive and fascinating, both scholarly and accessible.
A sweeping account of the evolution of world religion.
Providing a “minimalist definition” of religion as “belief in some kind of transcendental world (that may or may not coincide with our observable physical world) inhabited by spirit beings or forces (that may or may not take an interest in and influence the physical world in which we live),” noted anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Dunbar explores the full array of religious expression across the globe and throughout history and prehistory. Noting that religion is a universal fact of human culture, Dunbar divides the book into chapters dedicated to broad concepts of religious manifestation in civilization. Among others, the topics include the benefits of religion to people and societies, ranging from its role as a tool for cooperation to its use in community building; the global phenomenon of mysticism, which “involves direct ecstatic experience of the divine,” and the important effects that rituals have on the human brain; the ubiquity of religion in prehistory and how its practices might have helped solidify primitive cultures; and the remarkable growth in religious expression through the Neolithic period and beyond. Bringing us into modern times, Dunbar then explores the occurrence of charismatic cults and the spawning of new religious communities as well as the increasing frequency of schisms within existing religious movements. Near the end, he writes, “beneath the elegant superstructure of…sophisticated theologies lurk the ancestral shamanic religions of our deep history. These older forms play a crucial role in providing the psychological basis for being a believer, because, deep down, religion is largely an emotional, not an intellectual, phenomenon. They offer an explanation as to why the doctrinal religions are plagued by a constant welling up of cults and sects from within their own grassroots.” Seen in that way, religion is indeed an evolutionary tool in the formation of humankind as it exists today, and Dunbar is the perfect guide.
Thoroughly inclusive and fascinating, both scholarly and accessible.Pub Date: April 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-19-763182-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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