Product Description
Here are a series of tantalizing predictions about the coming century, delivered by thirty of today’s greatest minds–including Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel Dennett, Sherry Turkle, Steven Weinberg, Noam Chomsky, Umberto Eco, and John Kenneth Galbraith. This glittering list of contributors includes Nobel laureates, bestselling writers, intellectual icons, and scientists at the cutting edge of research. Readers can sample everything from Nigerian novelist Chinua Ache… More >>
Predictions: Thirty Great Minds on the Future
Tags: coming century, daniel dennett, john kenneth galbraith, noam chomsky, nobel laureates, research readers, sherry turkle, stephen jay gould, steven weinberg, umberto eco
#1 by Hugh Williams on July 3, 2010 - 3:50 pm
Review of Predictions by Sian Griffiths (Editor)
This book would be a great present for any person who has an interest in intellectual thought and ideas. It comprises a brief biography of each one of thirty great thinkers followed by a contribution from them outlining their view of the future for mankind. The biographies, in addition to giving a quick view of the life and times of those distinguished minds, also give a quick summaries of their contribution to modern thought. The explanations of their theories are clear and lucid but at a level which is comprehensible to the lay reader. The ideas are stimulating and a spur to discovering more about some of the theories and inventions of these great men and women. The contributions of the intellectuals themselves point to exciting changes and challenges for humanity in the 21st century. The contributors include, Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Umberto Eco, Lyn Margulis, Steven Pinker and 25 others. This is the nicest book I have read for a long time and one I am delighted to own.
Rating: 5 / 5
#2 by Alessandro Bruno on July 3, 2010 - 5:37 pm
When I saw the list of eminent minds that contributed to this volume in the index, I bought the book without further scrutiny. However, I was disappointed by most of the contributions. It seems the experts chose to save their best ideas for their own individual works. I enjoyed Umberto Eco, who always entertains doubts, Chomsky, Galbraith, Singer, Zizek and Dawkins. I found Achebe, Dworkin (particularly annoying), and Amartya sen to be repeating the same politically correct diatribes as always and lacking in real depth. The book is valuable, however, as a guide to seeking further understanding the ideas of the contributors. It provides bibliographies and biographies for each thinker. However, I suggest you look this up as brief refernce and then go out and buy the books from the thinkers you like.
Rating: 3 / 5
#3 by Craig Matteson on July 3, 2010 - 7:57 pm
I am glad that I have this book. Not because I agree with very much of anything in this book or admire the thinking or stature of any of these thirty “great minds”. This is such an exercise in arrogance and secularist delusion that it makes a wonderful way to get snapshots of the way such people think. I find much of the book disgusting, some of it laughable, and a bit of it frightening. A couple of the people chosen have useful things to say, but not many.
The format is that the editor spends more space writing a flattering introduction explaining the life work of the “great mind” than the mind gets for expounding what they predict and hope for the new century and millennium. Of course, these kinds of exercises are done each century and they are always embarrassing to look back on. Why? Because they are always an exercise in narcissism. The thinker is so in love with his own worldview that all future good is measured by how it conforms to that view. Isn’t that overweening sense of self clearly a manifestation of narcissism (at least solipsism)? But we can take hope in the tendency of the ways in whic the future has ways of confounding the present.
The best advice I have heard about the future came from the economist Herb Stein. He said that if a trend can’t continue it won’t.
I think that you can get copies of this book for about one penny or not much more. That should tell what the book’s future – just five years out – already thinks of their thinking.
Rating: 3 / 5
#4 by Anonymous on July 3, 2010 - 9:40 pm
“Predictions: Thirty Great Minds on the Future” is easily one of the most reader-friendly, chin-stroking collections of interviews and essays prognosticating time’s arrow I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot (Tommorow Now, Metatrends, etc.) Nothing is expanded in depth here. It’s more about breadth. If you don’t necessarily agree with what Richard Dawkins thinks, then read the interview/essay from Lynn Margulis (re: Margulis, Dawkins once said he’d rather share a conference table with Attila the Hun!).
Some of the previous reviewers seem to hold Predictions up to some pre-conceived notion. Well, everyone has pre-conceptions. We don’t come to books as tabula rasas. In fact, there’s something funny about the person who had trouble with the lack of “God” in this collection. It’s like going to St. Peter’s Cathedral and complaining you can’t find a good postcard. Ie. can’t see the forest for the trees. Maybe that’s not the best description, but I believe in God, and science, and the ability of deep thinkers to extrapolate upon the present to guide the future, and even intrigue our imaginations and… pre-conceptions. What’s life without change?
As Umberto Eco says: “Don’t fall in love with your own airship.”
Recommended for general science fans, writers looking for good/new ideas, and anyone who wants to learn about the direction we’re going in the time it takes to visit the watercloset.
Rating: 5 / 5
#5 by Stephen Gould on July 3, 2010 - 10:12 pm
As with other reviewers, I agree that the format of this book results in many of the Great Minds coming across as dull and boring. However, if you treat the book as an introduction to the various authors, then you can use it to gain a list of references to books written by those Great Minds – and I assure you that most of them are far from banal.
Rating: 3 / 5