An eco-activist’s angry wake-up call about the harm being done to the environment by polluters, both military and industrial, and the need for citizens to seize power over the technological bullies in their neighborhood. Ward, who moved to Grantsville, Utah, believing it to be a fine small town to raise a family, soon discovered some unpleasant truths about his new home. Grantsville is located on the rim of the Great Basin, a vast desert of some 165,000 square miles that is the site of various military installations, including the Tooele Army Depot. There, Ward learned, old munitions were exploded in open pits. Also nearby, the Magcorp magnesium refinery, characterized by Ward as “the dirtiest industrial operation in America,— was releasing huge amounts of chlorine gas into the air. Ward traces a pattern of abusive military activity marked by denial and coverup, and charges that a tradition of trading environmental quality for jobs and revenue has turned wilderness areas into “environmental sacrifice zones.” Now dedicated to the struggle for a clean environment, he describes the many battles in the long fight to keep the army from incinerating nerve agents and to force Magcorp to clean up its refinery, and he concludes that local citizen activists are the key to success. Surveying the continuing battle over paying to store nuclear waste in the Skull Valley Reservation, he shows the division between Indians who view it as a bonanza and those who view it as a disaster while making his own stand on the question clear. He and his Grantsville neighbors, he asserts, are like the canaries used by old-time coal miners to warn of lethal gases. This time, however, once toxins are in the air, water, and food chain, everyone, not just those immediately downwind or downstream, is at risk. Except for an excess of confusing acronyms and abbreviations, a highly readable addition to the growing body of writing on the toxicity of our environment.
Pub Date: Nov. 25, 1999
ISBN: 1-85984-750-1
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
