Sage advice and a much-needed perspective on how to build a future that benefits our species’ survival.
A futurist offers ways to improve the way we think about our decisions.
In his debut book, designer and writer Foster asks you to imagine the future. Whatever comes to mind, whether robots, glimmering gadgets, a sprouting civilization on another planet, or a grim wasteland where crops die and battles rage, may depend on what kinds of movies, books, ads, and media you’ve consumed. As a top designer at Google, Nokia, and Sony, Foster spent his career imagining next-generation spaces and products and offers up a framework for thinking about the present and future. “Our generation is experiencing technological and societal change at a rate and magnitude not felt by our ancestors, and the effects of this change can be bewildering,” Foster writes. But what if we considered the future more as an extension of today? With thoughtful descriptions of four mindsets, hence the book’s title, Foster blends history with current events to probe different ways humans tackle big issues, and the pitfalls and the positives of each. So-called “could” futurists, he writes, “harbor fantasies of incredible new worlds” and are “frustrated by pragmatism, rationalism, and skepticism.” Then comes “should” futurism, which Foster describes as a “strong-willed, opinionated, and cocksure confection.” Faced with a proclamation that this or that product or path will make things “better,” Foster suggests continually asking “why,” as a toddler would, to melt the “corporate gibberish” and reveal the “naked ambitions” beneath. “Might” futurists are broad thinkers but can be indecisive, whereas the “don’t” sector distrusts power and is drawn to negative consequences while exploring the full lifespan of an idea and its impact. Foster warns against sticking too closely to any of the four mindsets and begs readers to train themselves to think of the future in a way that is “less about what you saw in a sci-fi movie and more about where you buy your chewing gum.” Ultimately, the book strikes a hopeful note, as this GenX author points to us now entering “something of a golden age of dread about the future” and hails the younger generation for thinking about the future “from a position of responsibility and long-termism.”
Sage advice and a much-needed perspective on how to build a future that benefits our species’ survival.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9780374619350
Page Count: 272
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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