Do the incentives our tools tirelessly pursue on our behalf include human thriving, meaningful work, rich and humane interactions?
And it is from the delicate interplay between these two that Lloyd Jones is able to layer her rich and humane portrait.
The elegaic NYC is swept along on a melody worthy of Sigur Ros or My Bloody Valentine as Banks implores, "Turn on the bright lights", and mere gloom gives way to something rich and humane.
It is a portrait of the country of his childhood, the west African state of Mali, and in particular the city of Timbuktu, whose rich and humane traditions are being trampled, as Sissako sees it, by fanatical jihadis, often from outside the country.
We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are richer, more humane and much more joyful".
If he had allowed one or two of his more colorful subjects to linger a while, he'd have had a much richer, more humane document.
A rich, spacious and humane first novel, set in the 19th century, by a Dutch writer whose protagonist, an Ashanti prince from the Gold Coast, is more or less taken hostage in the 1830's and compelled to live out his life in an exile that places no value on a black man.
Sargent Shriver had a different view of America — warmer, richer and more humane.
"When they took over the conventions of ethnic mimicry," Howe wrote, "the Jewish performers transformed it into something emotionally richer and more humane.
While the current outpouring of migration fiction surely doesn't merit such scorn, this fiction's best contribution to a debased debate about migration should not be to engage with it, but rather to provide a richer and more humane alternative to it.
