From his number-crunching, Kemp is able to identify certain commonalities that attend societal collapse ... Feels something like reading the French economist Thomas Piketty filtered through Mad Max: Fury Road ... Kemp’s prose can be dry, and his prescriptions feel too general to be comforting. But Goliath’s Curse is still a strangely hopeful book.
Despite its shortcomings, Goliath’s Curse is best read as a call to channel apocalyptic angst into a productive political project, an appeal to combat oppression and inequality ... At a time like this, Kemp’s invitation to imagine what a better society could look like—and to believe that we might still avoid the worst outcomes—sounds a welcome note.
Deploys apocalyptic prose ... This weighty tome aims to emulate the impact of Sapiens … But that kind of book requires an author to possess exceptional gifts ... Kemp aspires to greater things than his predecessors … However, he concedes that the first section…contains a lot of educated guesswork ... In the middle section...Kemp is on less shaky ground. There’s some great detail here ... Kemp’s thesis begins to fray badly ... A book covering this great swathe of time, societal models, scientific progress and risk requires an Olympian detachment, the ultimate long view. But instead what the reader ultimately gets are the comforting ‘progressive’ orthodoxies of the 21st-century western academic world.
