A concise primer to the science and politics of climate change.
An admirably evenhanded appraisal of the challenges posed by climate change and the political solutions available.
According to Paepke (The Seinfeld Election, 2016, etc.), the most recent U.S. presidential election was sadly distinguished by bipartisan silence on the most pressing issues. When it came to climate change, however, the candidates were voluble but offered only unserious, hyperventilated rhetoric. Donald Trump blithely denies global warming and will likely ignore the Paris Treaty the Obama administration embraced. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, cast climate change as a catastrophe that poses an imminent threat to the globe. Paepke, however, wishes to shift the debate: “Partisans on both sides of the global warming divide are wrong, dangerously and radically wrong.” With meticulous care, the author articulates the case that global warning is not only real, but largely the result of human behavior, specifically man-made greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. The author contends that rising GHG concentrations in the atmosphere could potentially cause serious problems in the distant future, but these remain largely manageable for the remainder of this century. The most frightening prospect is a possible “meta-threat” or monumental disaster caused by warming that produces irreversible damage, like the melting of methane hydrate. There currently exists technological avenues to the reduction of GHG, but its wholesale elimination would result in considerable economic pain. Ultimately, Paepke offers a moderate plan that is both aggressive and market friendly, which aims at making the renewable energy no more costly than the dependence upon oil and natural gas. Paepke is rigorous and persuasive in this short work—this is more a white paper than a full-length monograph. (In fact, it’s unclear why this sequel wasn’t simply combined with its predecessor to make for one volume.) The entire work is relentlessly bipartisan and unencumbered by ideology, and it deftly discusses complex scientific issues with accessible aplomb. This should appeal to anyone who wishes to understand the messy intersection of scientific fact, political grandstanding, and public policy.
A concise primer to the science and politics of climate change.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 74
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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