A lucid but overly general discussion of leadership that lacks practical details.
A physician and researcher focuses on the need and means to create global leaders of moral integrity in this ambitious book.
According to Khan, the world is spiraling into poverty and war and the principal culprit is a failure of global leadership. The crux of this problem is moral in character—without the direction provided by “transcendent principles,” leaders are inclined to “selfishness, cruelty, egoism, and hysteria.” The moral order of the cosmos is guaranteed by a “universal organizing principle,” which one can, as the author does, refer to as God. Khan proposes that moral integrity could be spread through a program that identifies potential leaders in their youth and subjects them to a training regimen. This would require the establishment of a kind of global accreditation agency to compose the standards and oversee their implementation, an Independent Global Leadership Organization. Khan’s discussion is characteristically vague—he doesn’t provide a lot of actionable details regarding the nature of the selection of leaders or their training. In addition, he doesn’t examine the challenges of any test for leadership being globally accepted or enforced given thorny issues like political diversity and sovereignty. Even his understanding of a leader’s essential characteristics is unhelpfully broad—patience, open-mindedness, and compassion are inarguably good traits, but surely leadership requires much more than these attributes. The author is admirably open about his own religious commitments—he’s a practicing Muslim—and tries to articulate a message that could be generally palatable to theists of all stripes. Moreover, he writes in consistently clear prose unencumbered by technical jargon. But his suggestions are not only indeterminate, but also a bit naïve—the creation of moral leaders is not a simple matter of technocratic training. Ultimately, this is a peculiarly apolitical book given that the author’s mission is to improve the messy political world.
A lucid but overly general discussion of leadership that lacks practical details.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4808-9366-5
Page Count: 126
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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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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