A scattershot attempt to hit the broad side of a liberal barn.
A howl of protest against the globalist elite.
In a book similar to Carol Roth’s You Will Own Nothing, Bruner, associate director of the Government Accountability Institute and author of Compromised: How Money and Politics Drive FBI Corruption, charges that Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Georges Soros, and other billionaires are “creating technology and making investments that will micromanage every aspect of your life.” Consider the Covid-19 pandemic, which the uber-wealthy manipulated so that freedom-loving Americans would have to wear masks and stay home. Proof? In 2019, Johns Hopkins ran a series of projections to model a global pandemic, exercises that “covered lockdowns and quarantines, the shuttering of small businesses and mass job losses, widespread protests and riots, and the implementation of surveillance measures and biometric IDs.” Worse were the social media giants, which conspired to suppress misinformation. The list goes on. Gates loves fertilizer and “fake foods” like those produced by Impossible Foods, which has “the audacious goal of using genetically modified yeast to create a vegan burger that tastes (and even ‘bleeds’) like meat.” It gets worse, according to Bruner. Oprah Winfrey has joined forces with other billionaires to “champion birth control and abortion,” likely in some nefarious exercise in replacement theory, and Soros wants to convert democracy to “a Soros-controlled ‘open society’ ”—and so on. It’s telling that the targets of Bruner’s conspiracy theories are almost all on the left, and though he holds Elon Musk in some suspicion and divines that Ivanka Trump has not been a “very vocal opponent of the…globalist worldview,” there’s not a peep about the Koch brothers, who really love genetic modification. Also, writes Bruner, Donald Trump didn’t have a bit of help from the Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign.
A scattershot attempt to hit the broad side of a liberal barn.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780593541593
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Sentinel
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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
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