The blowout was awful, but look at the bigger picture, writes Safina in this illuminating, monitory study: “The real...
Oceanographer and nature writer Safina (The View from Lazy Point, 2011, etc.) etches an emotional topography of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil blowout.
The author begins in an artful, participatory-journalist mode, endeavoring to get his facts straight while unafraid to voice his interpretation of unfolding events. (A fitting hand-in-glove with Safina’s book is John Konrad’s Fire on the Horizon (2011), which presents a veteran deckhand’s view of the events and shares with it many conclusions.) Safina’s writing is jumpy, staccato and portentous as he follows the drilling work on the Deepwater Horizon, an accident-in-waiting with outdated equipment, a multitiered corporate management willing to dangerously cut corners and an absence of emergency preparation. When Halliburton’s cementing job unsurprisingly failed—“Halliburton officials knew weeks before the fatal explosion that its cement formulation had failed multiple tests—but they used the cement anyway”—at the expense of 11 lives, BP was more interested in controlling their public image than the wellhead. Appalled by the recklessness of the causes and the inanity of the response, the author is skeptical of BP’s announcements and cynical as to their motives. Sharing responsibility with BP is an oil-industry–besotted Congress, eager to subsidize their benefactors while cutting back on big-government safety regulations; the Coast Guard, whose over-measured response felt “like a Kabuki dance”; and a legal process that put the criminal in charge of the crime scene (BP security was given control of public space). Safina calls certain environmental organizations on their shrill, not necessarily helpful responses, and President Obama for not seizing the opportunity to bring energy policy before the public’s widened eye. The jury is out regarding environmental consequences: The Gulf appears to have absorbed the 206 million gallons of crude, but long-term effects of the dispersed oil will be tallied over years. Public perception of the devastation, fueled by a hyperventilating media, has wreaked havoc on tourism and fishing industries, which do not show evidence of poisonous degradation.
The blowout was awful, but look at the bigger picture, writes Safina in this illuminating, monitory study: “The real catastrophe is the oil we don’t spill…the oil we burn, the coal we burn, the gas we burn…And as the reefs dissolve and the ocean’s productivity declines, so will go the food security of hundreds of millions of people.”Pub Date: April 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-88735-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
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
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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