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About the author
Barry Jones was a Labor member of the Victorian and Commonwealth parliaments, led the campaign to abolish the death penalty, and became Australia’s longest-serving minister for science from 1983 to 1990. His books include Sleepers, Wake!, A Thinking Reed, Dictionary of World Biography, The Shock of Recognition, and, most recently, What is to be Done: political engagement and saving the planet. He received a Companion of the Order of Australia, Australia’s highest award, in 2014, and, at the age of 89, is a ‘living national treasure’.
Summary
A follow-up to the author’s prescient bestseller about the emergence of a post-industrial society.
When Sleepers, Wake! was released in 1982, it immediately became influential worldwide: it was read by Deng Xiaoping and Bill Gates; was published in China, Japan, South Korea, and Sweden; and led to the author being the first Australian minister to address a G-7 summit meeting, in Canada in 1985.
Now its author, the polymath and former politician Barry Jones, turns his attention to what has happened since — especially to politics and the climate in the digital age — and to the challenges faced by increasingly fragile democracies and public institutions.
Jones sees climate change as the greatest problem of our time, especially because political leaders are incapable of dealing with complex, long-term issues of such magnitude. Meanwhile, technologies such as the smartphone and the ubiquity of social media have destroyed our sense of being members of broad, inclusive groups. The COVID-19 threat, which was immediate and personal, has shown that some leaders could respond courageously, while others denied the evidence.
In the post-truth era, politicians invent ‘facts’ and ignore or deny the obvious, while business and the media are obsessed with marketing and consumption for the short term. What Is to Be Done is a long-awaited work from Jones on the challenges of modernity and what must be done to meet them.
Additional text
Praise for Sleepers, Wake!:
‘[A]n extremely interesting and provocative book … the author is justified in claiming that its central message is relevant to all industrial societies and it deserves to be widely read in all of them … What makes this book a much better attempt than most is the breadth of the approach, the sense of history, and the sense of humour … it is strong on the political implications of the information revolution and has admirable things to say on the dangers of technological disfranchisement and technological determinism. The critique of the role of the automobile in urban societies has seldom been put better … [A] book which should not be missed.’
