A mixed bag, more successful as historical description than cultural criticism.
Will technology liberate us, or further enslave us? That’s the big question underlying this treatise on machines and their discontents.
British economist Skidelsky begins by revisiting John Maynard Keynes’ prognostication that our smart machinery would free us to work only three hours or so a day—then noting that, alas, it hasn’t worked out that way. In a rather scattershot look at how we’ve failed to free ourselves, Skidelsky serves up Marx, Mumford, and Marcuse, along with Toynbee, St. Augustine, Arendt, et al. Sometimes he sounds exactly the right note, as when he identifies the unfortunate Greek inventor Icarus as the poster boy for hubris, “the attempt by humans to usurp the place of the gods in the scheme of life.” He is less convincing when he evokes pop culture, as when he calls Elon Musk “the Mad Max of the AI world.” (Mad Max was the good guy. If anything, Musk would probably self-identify as The Humungus.) Skidelsky rightly praises interdisciplinarity, but he’s at his best, if sometimes didactically so, when in his home fields of economics and history. On that ground, he writes interestingly of how Britain developed so rapidly as a tech nation because of both its non-predatory government (at least when not out gobbling up nations to build its empire) and its emphasis on property rights. He is less successful when on Jaron Lanier’s turf: the briar patches of AI and the philosophical implications of evolving machines. He may be too indulgent about the 1960s’ counterculture’s promise of the “transformation of human nature through sexual liberation,” though in closing the same sentence he hits on a hard truth: “Escape from the burden of work is open only to a tiny minority.” There’s good material here, but it takes burdensome work to get to it.
A mixed bag, more successful as historical description than cultural criticism.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781590517970
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
A powerful reiteration of principles—and some fresh ideas—from the longest-serving independent in congressional history.
Another chapter in a long fight against inequality.
Building on his Fighting Oligarchy tour, which this year drew 280,000 people to rallies in red and blue states, Sanders amplifies his enduring campaign for economic fairness. The Vermont senator offers well-timed advice for combating corruption and issues a robust plea for national soul-searching. His argument rests on alarming data on the widening wealth gap’s impact on democracy. Bolstered by a 2010 Supreme Court decision that removed campaign finance limits, “100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion” on 2024 elections. Sanders focuses on the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, describing their enactment of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” with its $1 trillion in tax breaks for the richest Americans and big social safety net cuts, as the “largest transfer of wealth” in living memory. But as is his custom, he spreads the blame, dinging Democrats for courting wealthy donors while ignoring the “needs and suffering” of the working class. “Trump filled the political vacuum that the Democrats created,” he writes, a resonant diagnosis. Urging readers not to surrender to despair, Sanders offers numerous legislative proposals. These would empower labor unions, cut the workweek to 32 hours, regulate campaign spending, reduce gerrymandering, and automatically register 18-year-olds to vote. Grassroots supporters can help by running for local office, volunteering with a campaign, and asking educators how to help support public schools. Meanwhile, Sanders asks us “to question the fundamental moral values that underlie” a system that enables “the top 1 percent” to “own more wealth than the bottom 93 percent.” Though his prose sometimes reads like a transcribed speech with built-in applause lines, Sanders’ ideas are specific, clear, and commonsensical. And because it echoes previous statements, his call for collective introspection lands as genuine.
A powerful reiteration of principles—and some fresh ideas—from the longest-serving independent in congressional history.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798217089161
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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