Urgent, sobering reading.
Envisioning the planet’s dire future.
Writer, humorist, and longtime activist Boyd describes himself as a “tragic optimist,” “can-do pessimist,” and “compassionate nihilist” when he considers efforts to reverse or mitigate environmental devastation. His “can-do” spirit led to his joining many activist groups and launching the Climate Clock, which “counts down the time remaining to prevent global warming rising above 1.5°C (currently six and a half years and closing), while simultaneously tracking our progress on key solution pathways (renewable energy, Indigenous land sovereignty, and others).” Realizing, though, that others may be so overcome with despair that activism seems futile, he offers this book as “a small head start on the grieving process—and some help answering the question, What is still worth doing?” An appendix lists nearly 40 organizations with which readers can engage. Boyd includes interviews with eight “hopers and doomers,” including Robin Wall Kimmerer, who explain their responses to the crisis. Climate scientist Guy McPherson predicts human extinction; eco-Buddhist Joanna Macy entitled her book Active Hope. Gopal Dayaneni, co-founder of the think tank Movement Generation, debunks the “Green scenario” because it “allows us to indulge the fiction that we can technologically innovate our way out of the crisis; that progress is inevitable.” Psychoanalyst Jamey Hecht believes it is possible “to know the worst and still be happy.” Boyd cautiously concurs: “While it’s too late to prevent catastrophe, if we step up our game, we can still build a new, more decent society on the ashes of the old.” All of the author’s evidence points to the inadequacy of capitalism and politics. Individual actions—recycling, a plant-based diet, biking and walking rather than driving—are not useless, but community is crucial for meaningful change. “We not only have the capacity to transform the world towards greater equity, justice, diversity, and integrity,” Gopal tells Boyd, but “if you look around, you’ll see that we are actually exercising that capacity everywhere.”
Urgent, sobering reading.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780865719835
Page Count: 416
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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