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HOW TO BE AUTHENTIC

Name: HOW TO BE AUTHENTIC
Author: Skye C. Cleary
ISBN: 978-1-250-27135-8

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND THE QUEST FOR FULFILLMENT

by Skye C. Cleary ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 16, 2022

An informative book that inspires readers toward their authentic selves.

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Can a person try to be authentic?

Contrary to its popular characterization, existentialism has never been a philosophy of darkness and despair. Its preoccupation with death is better understood as the background that enables a passionate embrace of life. What, after all, is more life-affirming than the notion that a person can, within certain limits, make of herself what she will—that we can all be, in Simone de Beauvoir’s phrase, “poets of our own lives”? As in her previous books Existentialism and Romantic Love and How To Live a Good Life, philosopher Cleary investigates existentialism as part of a long tradition of individual empowerment. Centered around the life and writings of Beauvoir, Cleary’s latest offers life advice so practical that at times it can be difficult to tell the philosophical from the common-sensical. What Cleary and Beauvoir ask us to do is, first, acknowledge facticity—that is, the givens of our life (where and when we were born, and so on)—and, second, exercise our freedom to take responsibility for everything else: who we are and what we do. The challenges lie in the application of this framework. In chapters devoted to marriage, aging, death, and the like, Cleary shows what it entails to take Beauvoir seriously. Some of the most moving passages in the book involve the author assessing her own life in these terms. In the chapter on self-sabotage, she describes turning “down being a guest on an important podcast because I’m afraid I won’t know what to say, or the words won’t come to me, or I’ll forget important points, or I’ll just sound stupid.” How refreshing to read a philosopher who achieves such vulnerability. Critical readers may object to Cleary’s overly broad conception of facticity and her superhero-strong sense of agency, but if they are wise, they will note these objections and then proceed to the business of taking good advice where they find it.

An informative book that inspires readers toward their authentic selves.

Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27135-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: St. Martin's Essentials

Review Posted Online: March 21, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022

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ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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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

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CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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.