Of considerable, if specialized, interest to climate activists and policymakers.
A blending of top-down and bottom-up approaches to climate change.
When the world is burning, is there time to change fire engines? Perhaps, write professors Sabel and Victor. The outlook may seem bleak, but new models of cooperation and “effective problem-solving” have been emerging in recent years. Some of these involve government, federal or state (as with California’s aggressive efforts to reduce carbon emissions); some are at the corporate level, generally driven by self-interest and the possibility that new methods of atmospheric decarbonization will yield new profit centers. Among the most effective measures, the authors suggest, are those that leverage local governance and involve the citizens who live on the ground in places where smokestacks are belching emissions or drag chains are deforesting the tropics. The authors deem this blend “experimentalist governance,” adding that changes and innovations will best come from several directions while requiring some sort of coordination. In a meaningful example, they suggest that battling overgrazing on the part of sheep would demand not only agreements on limits set by the shepherds themselves, but also on the possibility of breeding sheep that eat less grass or engineering new kinds of grass as well. This speaks to the authors’ assertion that battling climate change through, say, pollution reduction depends on “destabilizing innovation,” the kind of creative destruction that turned the world from landlines to cellphones. In sometimes-arid prose, the authors examine numerous case studies, including Brazil’s tangled efforts to preserve the Amazonian rainforest even as its developing economy considers it to be “unspoiled land to settle and exploit.” Throughout, they suggest that local people and “small groups of willing innovators” must pitch in to help further “open plurilateral agreements” at the national and international levels.
Of considerable, if specialized, interest to climate activists and policymakers.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-691-22455-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
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