An urgent eyewitness account of how culture and land are being destroyed by “a remorseless process of commodification.”
Sharp portraits of the predatory resource extraction practices that continue to plague Latin America.
In trying to combat poverty and inequity, Latin America has returned to unsustainable systems of extracting precious resources, as Robinson clearly demonstrates in this deeply troubling exposé. The author often refers back to Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America (1971), which chronicled the continent’s dictator-driven history of plunder of natural resources for the economic benefit of the oligarchy. Despite the so-called “pink tide” in the early years of the 20th century—a trend that included such progressive leaders as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Evo Morales in Bolivia—the urgent need to raise economic growth rates as a means to combat poverty and generate development has allowed the ruinous old model to return. In a work of excellent on-the-ground reportage, Robinson delineates how the demand for natural resources, “from soy to niobium, beef to gold, and oil to avocado,” is creating dangerous extraction cycles. Readers see the devastation firsthand as the author leads us to obscure, hard-to-reach mines and farming backwaters in countries from Brazil to Ecuador, Venezuela to Chile. Soy harvested from the ill Amazon rainforest supplies industrial chicken plants in Europe with some of the raw material to turn out billions of Chicken McNuggets. The potato, essential to the pre-Columbian civilizations in the Andean highlands, has been converted into the addictive, ubiquitous potato chip. In the Mexican region of Michoacán, the avocado has fallen victim to a monoculture run by organized crime. Even if the destructive mining of oil decreases in coming years, the increased use of battery-powered technology will require further extraction of rare minerals like copper, cobalt, silver, and lithium. Despite mass protests over the past few years in Colombia, Chile, and Ecuador, Robinson is not optimistic about the future, but she lays out the situation in stark, penetrating detail.
An urgent eyewitness account of how culture and land are being destroyed by “a remorseless process of commodification.”Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61219-935-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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