A touch scattered but of interest to anyone concerned with climate change and our long, lamentable history of ignoring it.
Broad-ranging history of the catastrophic crisis that is well underway.
Bell, a climate activist based in London, opens her account with a moment that will come as news even to readers versed in the literature: when a scientist and women’s rights activist named Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated in 1856 that “an atmosphere heavy with carbon dioxide could send temperatures soaring.” The results of Foote’s experimental work were presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and then shelved until 2011, when a petroleum geologist chanced upon it. As Bell writes, it would not be the first time that data would be ignored. Her narrative zigzags among the Enlightenment and the present and points between, tracing how ideas about the climate as a world system came to be codified. Some of the narrative feels like a data dump, but the author’s account takes on greater force in her discussions of the near past and present, when inescapable evidence mounts to indicate how badly we’ve erred in overlooking the deleterious effects of fossil fuels. And it is we, collectively, who have brought this on. Although “the climate crisis has been and remains a problem of elites’ making,” enriching a handful of mostly White men, it is a problem that has been aired in the past and then brushed aside time and again. Bell is at her best when recounting these frequent observations, many of which were taken positively, as when a Swedish glaciologist argued that the retreat of glaciers around the world was really an example of “climate embetterment.” It has become clear that it is not an improvement, and Bell warns that we have to remake the world’s economy while also adapting to the effects of climate change already in motion—“and we have a rapidly vanishing snippet of time in which to do all this.”
A touch scattered but of interest to anyone concerned with climate change and our long, lamentable history of ignoring it.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64009-433-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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