If no clear thesis or mandate about waste emerges, the collection of amazing factoids makes for entertaining reading.
An overview of waste in its myriad forms.
Every year, the total amount of gas spilled at the pump equals that of the Exxon Valdez disaster. The asteroid 16 Psyche, between Jupiter and Saturn, contains a variety of metals valued at around $700 quintillion. Online orders are returned 30% of the time. “Sixty percent of the world is still without indoor toilets, while Americans spend half a billion dollars a year on Halloween costumes…for their pets.” Such intriguing facts are thick on the ground in this collaboration between Reese, a tech entrepreneur, and Hoffman, a literary agent. As the authors write, waste is undesirable, incurs a net negative cost, and can be avoided; that definition is roomy enough to encompass water, plastic, gold, food, electricity, money, time, and human potential. “No one wants to waste,” they write, and many work hard to avoid it, “but the world is full of well-meaning attempts to avoid waste that actually cause more waste than they prevent.” Most of the book is lively and humorous, though the chapters on wasting energy and natural resources are more scientific than the rest. "If the planet's carbon system is generally in balance without human activity, why don't the 40 gigatons humans emit each year stay in the atmosphere—or [be] reabsorbed, the way naturally produced CO2 is?" Though the authors suggest that "astute readers" may be wondering this, some may have checked out already. The final section, "The Philosophy of Waste," considers more abstract quantities, creating an abrupt transition in a book that could have used a little more smoothing around the edges. Still, the anecdotes are often amusing. For example, a hedge fund manager once paid Kenny Rogers $4 million to play "The Gambler" over and over at a party. He was later convicted of fraud, fined, and imprisoned. "Evidently,” write the authors, “he knew neither when to walk away nor when to run."
If no clear thesis or mandate about waste emerges, the collection of amazing factoids makes for entertaining reading.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13518-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Currency
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2021
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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