A powerful case for independent thought.
Kavanagh explores the hazards of blind allegiance to political and religious ideologies in this nonfiction debut.
Born into a conservative Irish Catholic home, the author was taught (or in his words, “indoctrinated”) to simply accept the family’s religious faith without question. At the time, he found comfort in his unbridled loyalty to this belief system, which not only provided cut-and-dried answers to the complexities of life and death, but also promised its adherents that their “status and identity would be raised to new heights.” Yet an off-putting experience during confession (related to the sin of eating meat on a Friday), combined with contradictory messages from Church leadership, prompted Kavanagh to question his faith as a teenager. Later, during a college visit to Yale (where he would eventually earn a degree), the author was introduced to the scholarship on genocide, learning of the interwoven histories of ideological movements and extreme violence. With a subsequent graduate degree from Columbia University, and as the CEO of Market Corporation of America, Kavanagh draws on his own personal experiences and solid grasp of world history to make his case against ideological extremism. The book begins with an interdisciplinary look at the psychological attraction of ideologies across the political and religious spectrums, emphasizing how they offer adherents the “the promise of a better life or better world,” ease anxieties, and provide access to social groups that “give meaning to their lives.” He goes on to examine how power-hungry leaders have exploited ideologies for their own ends and the roles of ideologies in fostering some of history’s grimmest examples of brutality.
The strength of the book lies in its critique of extremism on all sides. In surveying the popularity of Donald Trump, for instance, Kavanagh discusses the corrosive aspects of Christian Nationalism on American democracy, from targeting reproductive rights to the marginalization of immigrants, non-Christians, and others deemed “second class citizens.” Alternately, the author details the failures of Leftist movements in providing promised utopias, noting the death tolls associated with the killing fields of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge and Mao’s Great Famine and Cultural Revolution in China. Indeed, per Kavanagh’s convincing historical narrative, nearly all of the world’s worst atrocities—from transatlantic slavery to the Holocaust—have ideological roots. Making the case against “absolutism” (which the book defines as “The Refuge of Small Minds”), the author urges readers to question the ideological fallacies that they may blindly embrace and offers pragmatic advice for “developing well-grounded, bottoms-up belief systems” based on openness, high standards of evidence, research, and intellectual honesty. Writing explicitly for a general audience, Kavanagh here aims to provide “ordinary people” with a path toward ideological freedom. His accessible writing style is backed by a solid grasp of the relevant academic literature—the text is accompanied by two dozen pages of endnotes and bibliographic citations. While at times a bit reductionist in its terminology (for instance, using simplistic definitions of “Evangelical Christianity” that ignore the vibrant history of America’s Black churches in defying their white counterparts), the book otherwise mounts a powerful argument against extremism on all sides. A useful appendix offers readers a systematic timeline of “Mass Killing[s] By Ideology,” providing thorough documentation of ideological violence associated with imperialism, racism, religious fanaticism, and other scurrilous ideas.
A powerful case for independent thought.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9798339528289
Page Count: 171
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
