A thoughtful, well-grounded cultural history.
A wide-ranging study of self-creation.
Burton, a novelist, scholar of theology, and essayist, examines the idea that we have the power “to remake ourselves and our realities” to reflect our desires. Organized chronologically, from the Renaissance to internet influencers, the author’s investigation charts “an increasingly disenchanted world” in which humans lost faith that God created each individual’s unalterable personality. Rather, they came to believe in their own power of self-transformation. Burton cites German painter Albrecht Dürer, for example, as an artist who “forged a personality that sustained and advertised his work, even as his work— constantly emblazoned with his trademark—advertised the man. “Dürer-the-artist, Dürer-the-portrait, and Dürer-the-advertiser all mutually reinforced one another.” In Regency England, the “middle-class upstart” Beau Brummell saw fashion as a means to social and political influence. “The perception of the right people at the right time,” he understood, “was at the heart of this new avenue toward power. Perception was something that the clever and intrepid could learn how to shape.” Rather than reflect social station, fashion came to express individual personality as well as political identity. In 1859, acclaimed orator Frederick Douglass lectured on the “Self-Made Man,” asserting that work was the key to remaking the self. Burton’s well-populated history features figures such as Thomas Edison, “one of the canniest self-promoters”; the outrageous Oscar Wilde; and writer Elinor Glyn, inventor of the term it, defined as “a blend of raw sex appeal, Wildean dandyism,” and “quasi-magical personal magnetism.” The quality of “it” lay at the heart of a burgeoning celebrity culture. Perhaps the oddest group of self-creators are extropians, “interested in optimizing every aspect of human existence, transforming the body into the best possible machine” through technology. The author concludes that our search for self-definition is ultimately a search for what it means to be human: vulnerable and inextricably interconnected.
A thoughtful, well-grounded cultural history.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781541789012
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
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
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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