An interesting, deeply researched, and sometimes disturbing look into the science of what makes us tick.
Forget about doing away with inequality, writes science journalist Storr—not while humans are humans and leopards don’t change their spots.
What keeps striving humans up at night? Not wealth, sexual conquest, or security: No, writes Storr; it’s status, the relative position we hold vis-à-vis those around us. The quest for high status deforms our better angels. “Always on alert for slights and praise,” he writes, “we can be petty, hateful, aggressive, grandiose and delusional.” In fact, “status is a fundamental human need.” It’s not just that we need to be admired; we must be admired more than the person next to us, and we’re hard-wired for that golden key: Holding status affords access to wealth, sex, security, and every other thing that we desire. Digging into anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and other realms, Storr outlines the evolutionary history of our need as social animals to belong to a group—and, once inside a group, to attain rank. Sometimes this plays out in odd ways. One of the many layered examples the author presents is the case of a Micronesian island community in which status is attained by the farmer who could grow the largest yam to present to the village leader, resulting in a society of secretive, jealous, mistrustful Mendelians and plenty of disharmony. Those who do not attain status through yams or heroics—or are shunned or ridiculed—can do very bad things. Storr locates status loss as an ingredient in the makings of serial killers, the Unabomber, and other miscreants. “Humiliation can be seen as the opposite of status, the hell to its heaven,” he writes. “Like status, humiliation comes from other people.” When other people engineer that status loss, mayhem can ensue, especially today’s “neoliberal game,” which relies on a zero-sum formula of have and have-not. Pair this eye-opening book with W. David Marx’s equally revelatory Status and Culture.
An interesting, deeply researched, and sometimes disturbing look into the science of what makes us tick.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-00-835467-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper360
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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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