RaveThe Guardian (UK)You may well wonder how such a faintly comical theme can be extended for 350 pages, and what it has to do with Klein’s usual preoccupations of combating corporate capitalism and climate crisis. It is certainly the most introspective and whimsical of Klein’s books to date, but it is also one of surprising insights, unexpected connections and great subtlety. The Klein/Wolf confusion is an entry point to consider wider forms of disorientation that afflict the left ... This is a book that offers scant optimism for the future, but if there is hope lingering here, it’s that collective self-reflection – through historical knowledge and organising – offers political resources that solitary self-reflection never will. True to form, Klein’s ultimate message is log off and get on to the streets.
Richard Seymour
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Seymour means to horrify us, and he succeeds ... It is the psychoanalytic inflections that elevate this book above so much recent \'techlash” literature. Seymour sidesteps and occasionally demolishes the more familiar tropes with which we understand smartphone addiction and \'online mobs”, instead searching for the underlying psychic and social roots of these malaises, which are being obscured by this vast \'writing experiment\'. Each of us keeps our phone close, he observes, \'charged at all times. It is as though, one day, it’s going to bring us the message we’ve been waiting for\' ... Only by recognising that we’re all inside this dark story might we acquire the power and urgency to get out – at least, that seems to be Seymour’s hope. Books this striking aren’t obliged to conclude with the typical \'so what do we do?\' chapter, and The Twittering Machine doesn’t. We must rediscover the emancipatory aspect of writing, he argues, in defiance of the suffocating, regimented dystopia being forced on us. The book is a thrilling demonstration of what such resistance can look like, by one of the most clear-sighted and unyielding critics writing today. We should all read it.
Steven Pinker
MixedThe Guardian\"Enlightenment Now is a bold, wonderfully expansive and occasionally irate defence of scientific rationality and liberal humanism, of the sort that took root in Europe between the mid-17th and late 18th century … The book is really a polemic, albeit one with a vast number of footnotes. With some deft intellectual moves, he manages to position ‘enlightenment’ and ‘science’ on the right side of every argument or conflict, while every horror of the past 200 years is put down to ignorance, irrationality or “counter-enlightenment” trends … The vice-like grip of Pinker’s reasoning derives from his curious relationship to intellectual history.\
