Working across disciplines, the authors offer valuable tools for understanding this complex, confusing era.
A pertinent study about how knowing what questions to ask is the way to cut through confusion and misunderstanding.
This interesting, challenging book is based on a popular “Big Ideas” course at UC Berkeley. Perlmutter, Campbell, and MacCoun—a physicist, philosopher, and psychologist, respectively—aim to help people “learn to think about big problems and make effective decisions in this ‘too much information’ age.” Media saturation, data overload, fake news, and the proliferation of experts (and pseudo-experts) have combined to make the world seem like a labyrinthine mess. The authors argue that the methodology of science provides a way out, and it can be applied broadly as long as the process is properly understood. They lay out the questions to ask, the ways to separate facts from opinions, how to distinguish reliable information from background noise, how to think in terms of probabilities instead of absolutes, and how to incorporate personal values. As the authors demonstrate throughout, this approach involves a change of thinking. Get out of the echo chamber of the like-minded, they advise, and make contact with people who have different views. Review your opinions and policies, and admit it if you were wrong. Be aware of your own biases, especially the tendency to believe things simply because they confirm your views. Perlmutter, Campbell, and MacCoun provide case studies and thought exercises from their respective fields, but they avoid jargon wherever possible. They admit that the methodology can be difficult to use, although it gets easier with practice. This book is not an easy book to read and requires a good deal of attention, but the authors present many useful lessons for making sense of what is happening around us.
Working across disciplines, the authors offer valuable tools for understanding this complex, confusing era.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780316438100
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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