![]() Fury at the now well-documented role big pharma played in its creation ripples through Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer prizewinning novel, a hillbilly coming-of-age saga that seizes from its opening line. Last year in the US, opioids were involved in more than 80,000 overdose deaths, representing yet another hike in an epidemic that began in the mid-1990s and shows no signs of abating. PD Smith £11.43 (RRP £12.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop But his book offers an invaluable framework for understanding the serious issues and challenges that will confront us all in the coming years, and perhaps grounds to be hopeful too. He is aware that at a time when public attitudes appear increasingly gloomy, his conclusions may seem too optimistic: “those of us who do sometimes focus on success stories get mocked for our supposedly Panglossian view of the world”. McRae’s thoughtful and solidly researched long view of global trends is welcome in an age of rolling news and hot takes on social media. But to do so it has to reinvent itself, dumping its residual arrogance about its special place in the world and thinking of itself “more as a big Switzerland, not a small United States”. Migrants from around the world will help drive the economic growth needed in the UK, and it will eventually approach Germany both in population and economic size. But by the 2050s it will, he suggests, be “more confident, more-outward-looking and more prosperous as part of a family of nations linked by language and history – the Anglosphere”. The UK, for example, faces a decade or so of “confusion” after the traumatic Brexit process. Nevertheless, McRae’s book is wide-ranging and detailed, drawing on an impressive array of data to analyse key global trends, before focusing in on the future prospects for regions and countries. The World Wide Web was not widely available until 1991 and he missed the extraordinary transformation that has occurred by linking computers together, an example of the limitations of crystal ball gazing. McRae admits that one of his biggest oversights was the social impact of technology. He was also “broadly correct” in predicting that in the 2020s the world would be “more prosperous, healthier, better educated and informed, and more peaceful than in the early 1990s or indeed in any previous period of recorded history”. An earlier study, published in 1994, attempted the same exercise for 2020 and, according to McRae, foresaw that Brexit was a real possibility, a pandemic was a threat, and that concerns about the environment would become a major issue. The financial journalist Hamish McRae has written an insightful survey of what the world may be like in the next 20 to 30 years. From the vantage point of greater age, one might point out that it is not an either/or situation, and perhaps Selin’s further adventures will help her appreciate that.Īlex Clark £9.29 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Hot dishes” – might be just as useful, and indeed truthful, as the greatest literature. ![]() ![]() Spending her summer updating student guidebooks, Selin seems suddenly struck by the idea that conveying information plainly – “Hearty sandwiches. For Selin, now in her sophomore year and with an unsatisfactory, perplexing quasi-relationship with mathematics student Ivan apparently behind her, the real issue seems not so much how to make a choice between two starkly opposed systems, but how to start living at all.Įither/Or does not exactly conclude rather, a third volume seems almost inevitable, given that Selin appears to be leaving Kierkegaard and Breton to one side as she embarks on a reading of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. ![]() Should one spend one’s brief time on Earth guided by hedonism and pleasure, or by morality and responsibility? The second instalment of Elif Batuman’s chronicle of Selin, a student of Russian literature at Harvard in the 1990s whose biography corresponds fairly closely to the writer’s own, takes as its title Søren Kierkegaard’s first book, which suggests that one must choose whether to live according to ethical or aesthetic principles.
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