Braver New World Author: John Kampfner ISBN-13: 978-1805462507Publisher: Atlantic BooksGuideline Price: £22It was some time last year, around my 40th birthday, that the question first pinged into my brain: is this creeping feeling that the whole world is getting worse a normal side effect of ageing or a product of these … times.It would appear that John Kampfner, a journalist since before the fall of the Berlin Wall, has experienced similar notions. But rather than wallow in the dread and gristle, his response has been to search the planet for relief. Braver New World is part ode to human ingenuity and part travel log as Kampfner visits nations enjoying great successes in healthcare, housing, environmental protection, and other criteria in the building of a happy and cohesive society.It sounds like the outline for a travel documentary series and, sure enough, the text sometimes reads like voiceover: “My odyssey to the sun begins along a winding highway,” writes Kampfner as he explores Morocco and its “fields of solar panels as far as the eye can see”. The approachable, present-tense narration keeps the reader right by the author’s side through this epic journey of discovery.Though the book is episodic, with each chapter covering a different country and sociopolitical theme, sections do speak to each other, and much of that conversation is how right-wing populism poisons everything. Enlightenment is under threat by groups pushing their anti-immigration shtick as the ointment for all ills, and the mainstream politicians are happy to see the debate become a race to the bottom. Despite the scaremongering, only 3 per cent of the world’s population are migrants and, I would point out, this figure would be lower if not for push factors such as war and climate change – issues sidelined for the archaic and impossible tactic of closing borders. “Every week you can read another news story about the world on fire, floods, disappearing ice floes, collapsing coastlines,” writes Kampfner, who is British, in his analysis of the gains Costa Rica has made in environmentalism. “Yet in many countries, climate change is now dismissed as ‘woke’.”The revolutionary may deem some of these initiatives as delivering only incremental change; the book’s quick mentions of those living in poverty in India, as the more fortunate enjoy advances in tech, reveal that wealth inequality requires radical solutions. But Braver New World is an accessible read about complicated problems that offers a replenishing boost of a most precious commodity: faith in a better tomorrow.Dean Van Nguyen is an author and critic