A thoughtful and well-reasoned guide to making lifestyle decisions.
A manual looks at how individual choices shape the future of society.
In this companion to his Coming of Age in the Global Village (1990), Cook offers a framework for describing the different viewpoints, mentalities, and ways of thinking about all aspects of human life—religion and spirituality, personal responsibility, systems of governance, consumption, the environment, and militarism, among many others. This framework is a way to understand and guide people toward making decisions that are optimal for their own lives and for the future of humanity as a whole. The author outlines these viewpoints through a series of 52 choices between opposing worldviews, detailed in the book’s appendix and on a companion website. Using his own preferences as examples, Cook explains how the combination of values and choices he has made has allowed him to pursue a sustainable lifestyle, reduce his carbon footprint, build a community of friends and relatives, and develop an authentic spiritual life. He provides his choices as an example for readers to adapt to their own circumstances. Drawing on the author’s scientific background as a professor and research specialist, the book also takes an analytical approach to climate change and other crucial topics, showing how and why humans can and should take steps toward sustainability. Although the prose can be meandering at times and the volume’s pacing could be tighter, readers will likely be willing to overlook occasional narrative shortcomings in favor of Cook’s enthusiastic and authentic storytelling. Throughout the text, he demonstrates a deep knowledge of wide-ranging subjects, and the book’s many references to Coming of Age demonstrate that the author has returned to his topics many times since 1990, refining and strengthening his analysis in the intervening decades. The manual makes a persuasive case for moving toward a more sustainable lifestyle—although few readers are likely to join Cook in “peecycling,” using their own urine to fertilize homegrown crops—and for making choices that are true to one’s values without demonizing those who follow a different path.
A thoughtful and well-reasoned guide to making lifestyle decisions.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978- 0-9627349-5-3
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Parthenon Books
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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