Book Review; July 1993; Scientific American Magazine; by Gerard Piel; 4 Page(s)

In 1988 Paul Kennedy welcomed the Bush administration into office with the advice that the U.S. had begun to follow the British Empire into the inevitable second phase of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, as his popular book was entitled. Now the J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History at Yale University welcomes the Clinton administration with the word that there is more to history than history.

In Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, he asserts that political leaders must reckon with three crises approaching from outside of history as it is usually told. Kennedy sees them, inextricably interconnected, as the current doubling of the world population, the peril in which the crowding human presence places the global ecosystem and the disruption of social institutions as well as the environment by technologies that are taking over life functions, including those of the human nervous system.