A powerful argument in favor of human virtue that will probably not catch on.
“There is a persistent myth that by their very nature, humans are selfish, aggressive, and quick to panic.” British historian and journalist Bregman disagrees, making a convincing case that we’re not so bad.
In Lord of the Flies, a group of boys stranded on an island descend into savagery. The author turns up a real-life version that turned out much better: In 1965, six teenagers were marooned on a tiny, waterless islet, and they cooperated until their rescue 15 months later, when they were alive and healthy. Bregman’s fascinating examination of pro-depravity evidence reveals an alarming amount of error. Readers may remember the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese; newspapers reported that 38 bystanders heard her screams and did nothing. Journalistic incompetence, writes the author; multiple neighbors came to her aid. Iconic scientific studies reveal crippling flaws. In a 1971 prison study at Stanford, researchers divided students into “prisoners” and “guards.” Within days, the guards became abusive. Bregman reveals that it was a “hoax”; researchers instructed the guards to behave badly. At the peak of human depravity lies Nazi administrator Adolph Eichmann. At his 1961 trial, he portrayed himself as a desk-bound bureaucrat carrying out his boss’s orders. The phrase “the banality of evil” entered the lexicon. Subsequent research in Nazi archives revealed Eichmann as a psychopath. After cogently laying out the problem, the author turns to solutions. For example, 20% of those discharged from Norway’s cushy prisons return in two years, the world’s lowest recidivism rate and a big money-saver; in the U.S., it’s 60%. Experts agree that oppressive prisons increase crime, but reform efforts invariably fizzle; “coddling” criminals outrages most Americans. Bregman describes businesses without bosses, schools in which teachers assume that students want to learn, and local governments in which citizens exert genuine power wisely. Readers may wonder why these are not spreading like wildfire. Since good studies show that deeply held false beliefs remain immune to evidence, human depravity must qualify.
A powerful argument in favor of human virtue that will probably not catch on. (b/w illustrations)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-41853-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.
A story of ordinary people, both victims and survivors, thrown into extraordinary history.
Pellegrino says his book is “simply the story of what happened to people and objects under the atomic bombs, and it is dedicated to the hope that no one will ever witness this, or die this way, again.” Images of Aug. 6, 1945, as reported by survivors, include the sight of a cart falling from the sky with the hindquarters of the horse pulling it still attached; a young boy who put his hands over his eyes as the bomb hit—and “saw the bones of his fingers shining through shut eyelids, just like an X-ray photograph”; “statue people” flash-fossilized and fixed in place, covered in a light snowfall of ashes; and, of course, the ghosts—people severely flash-burned on one side of their bodies, leaving shadows on a wall, the side of a building, or whatever stood nearby. The carnage continued for days, weeks, and years as victims of burns and those who developed various forms of cancer succumbed to their injuries: “People would continue to die in ways that people never imagined people could die.” Scattered in these survivor stories is another set of stories from those involved in the development and deployment of the only two atomic weapons ever used in warfare. The author also tells of the letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard to Franklin D. Roosevelt that started the ball rolling toward the formation of the Manhattan Project and the crew conversations on the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, the planes that dropped the Little Boy on Hiroshima and the Fat Man on Nagasaki. We have to find a way to get along, one crew member said, “because we now have the wherewithal to destroy everything.”
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798228309890
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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