A fascinating and darkly revealing dive into the world’s garbage.
Uncovering a dirty business.
In the 1970s, a self-appointed “garbologist” went through the trash of famous folks like Bob Dylan and published lists of what he found, hoping to reveal dark secrets. In Charles Dickens’ novel Our Mutual Friend, a character known as the Golden Dustman amasses a fortune from rubbish—or “dust” as the Victorians called it. Clapp, a journalist based in Greece, is a literal and figurative muckraker, exploring a slew of astonishing trash-related topics. In one chapter, he focuses on the island of Chios, observing that local residents rank among the world’s “most unethical ship dismantlers.” Clapp unearths trash and waste in Turkey, Ghana, Java, and Guatemala, which, he writes, “boast[s] a bleak history as the serial target of toxic waste dumping by US cities and corporations.” Not surprisingly, the United States exports much of the world’s trash. “By the early 2000s,” Clapp writes, “America’s biggest export to China was the stuff Americans tossed away.” The European Union doesn’t come off looking too clean, either. “At least as much plastic was getting jettisoned out of the European Union, from self-congratulating environmental stewards like Germany, whose state recycling quotas were often reliant on a filthy secret: much of the plastic that Germans claimed was getting ‘recycled’ was in fact getting shipped to the far side of the world, where its true fate was far from clear.” Clapp is loath to end on a hopeful note, but he tells of Izzettin Akman, a farmer in Turkey whose oranges and lemons are threatened by tons of trash that is dumped—and set on fire—near his crops. Akman takes to pursuing the garbage trucks in his pickup—“a lonesome sheriff against a system of globe-spanning waste mismanagement,” Clapp writes. “I’ll keep following the trucks until they stop coming,” Akman says. “Or until the world stops sending them.”
A fascinating and darkly revealing dive into the world’s garbage.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780316459020
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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