... employs a wide lens, drawing on governance, economics and culture. Call it 'applied history' ... Having laid out a 'gloomy compendium of threats,' Zakaria rightly celebrates 'our resilient world' ... With his lively language and to-the-point examples, Zakaria tells the story well, while resisting boilerplate as served up by the left and the right. Nor does he spare his own liberal class, the 'meritocracy' of the best educated and better off, which he fingers ever so gently as deepening the divide between urban and rural, elites and 'deplorables.' He might have said a bit more about the uses and abuses of cultural hegemony that have driven hoi polloi into the arms of Donald Trump and triggered defections from the democratic left in Europe ... Both The Financial Times and Zakaria’s book urge a revolution already upon us, and probably represent today’s zeitgeist and reality ... read Ten Lessons. It is an intelligent, learned and judicious guide for a world already in the making.
... a pithy roundup of some of the inevitable global changes that will follow the current pandemic ... Examining issues both obvious and subtler, Zakaria sets out how and why the world has changed forever ... A cleareyed, concise look at current and future affairs offering pertinent points to reflect and debate.
... [a] scattershot treatise ... In the book’s strongest sections, Zakaria argues that America needs a less fragmented and gridlocked government bureaucracy to cope with health threats, and he calls for more honesty and empathy from scientists, and foresees accelerated migration of work and life onto the internet. Other points seem tangential to the virus (the rise of robots and artificial intelligence to displace humans), or rehash Zakaria’s already well-articulated stances (he spends many pages defending globalization and multilateralism against Trumpian nationalism) ... He anthropomorphizes Covid-19 as 'nature’s revenge' for overpopulation and human environmental encroachments, and suggests that 'promoting healthier diets' will help to prevent the next pandemic. Zakaria also disparages America’s Covid-19 response by cherry-picking the statistic that by July 2020 'per-capita daily death rates in the United States were ten times higher than in Europe,' without noting that the continent’s outbreak peaked earlier, with similarly high death rates in multiple countries. This less-than-cogent analysis of the coronavirus pandemic leaves much to be desired.
