Recommended for anyone who wants to spend time with intelligent minds wrestling not with each other but with understanding.
The text version of the popular, hyperarticulate, interviewed-based podcast.
So much of public debate in America, circa 2020, takes one of two forms: people arguing in order to generate controversy or conversations in which the interviewer is little more than a set piece for an unchallenged monologue. Harris aims for something eminently more useful. This lightly edited sampling of his podcast of the same name includes long-form interviews with scholars and intellectuals on a range of topics. Whether the discussion is about artificial intelligence, the future capacities of knowledge, politics, philosophy, intuition, history (philosopher Thomas Metzinger shares experiences from post–World War II Germany that are hard to look away from), religion, reason, or the nature of consciousness, Harris grounds lofty discussions with concrete examples and his gift for analogy. Few of the interviewees are household names—perhaps aside from psychologist Daniel Kahneman and Timothy Snyder—but readers will not question their credentials or motives. If you’re bright, well read, and secure in yourself, you don’t mind having your arguments examined, even by thinkers with the intellectual chops to poke holes in the fabric of your life’s work. Case in point: The interview with physics professor David Deutsch contains the guest’s criticism of the host’s self-described “cherished” thesis from Harris’ book The Moral Landscape. This critique wasn’t spontaneous; Deutsch had initiated a private conversation, and Harris asked for permission to press record. This speaks to the author’s agenda: free and open debate, in the best sense of the word. Nonacademics may hit intellectual potholes when encountering words like epiphenomenalism and panpsychist and, to be sure, this is no breezy read. But the book’s advantage over the podcast is that readers can linger as they need to and cherry-pick interviews at will.
Recommended for anyone who wants to spend time with intelligent minds wrestling not with each other but with understanding.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-285778-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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