An intelligent, persuasive book about events that are all too current.
How Osama bin Laden helped bring about not just 9/11, but also the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Donald Trump, writes Daily Beast senior national security correspondent Ackerman, “understood something about the War on Terror that [others] did not”—namely, that underlying it was the view that the enemy comprised non-White groups and nations “from a hostile foreign civilization.” Read: Islam. Certainly, that’s how many Muslims read it, and though Trump decried America’s foreign wars, he did little to rein in the hyperactive military. Anti-Muslim sentiment long predated 9/11, but when the towers fell, the resulting “Forever War,” its targets almost exclusively Muslim, backfired. It was ill defined and essentially unwinnable, “intolerable for a people accustomed to thinking of itself as exceptional.” While that war was fought abroad, it reverberated powerfully at home, where a surveillance state developed that had unprecedented police powers and “an atmosphere of paranoia that frequently turned conspiratorial.” As Ackerman rightly points out, the paranoia was directed toward Muslims but also toward liberals who were presumed to coddle the enemy. It was pointedly not directed at the domestic right-wing terrorists who have worked just as much mischief as al-Qaida. Immediately after the tragedies at Ruby Ridge and Waco, the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre denounced federal agents in their “stormtrooper uniforms” as enemies of “law-abiding citizens,” a view very much in evidence today. Meanwhile, hate crimes against Muslims have steadily risen, fueled by nativism, evangelical zealotry, and racism, all of which congealed in the cynical MAGA movement, which brought the world the spectacle of the right-wing extremist invasion of the Capitol and ongoing attempts to declare Trump the winner of the 2020 election—even as the Trump administration branded peaceful protestors as insurrectionists. Ackerman capably connects seemingly disparate elements without forcing issues so that readers will see how such matters as the Branch Davidian siege of 1993 helped fuel White supremacist movements today.
An intelligent, persuasive book about events that are all too current.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984879-77-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
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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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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