A fine account, worthy of fertile discussion, of yet another environmental disaster.
A disquieting study of what Foreign Policy called “the gravest natural resource shortage you’ve never heard of.”
Phosphorus was discovered in 1669 by a German alchemist who observed a white, waxy solid that glowed in the dark and burst into flame “just a little above room temperature.” Egan, who won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, explains its most vital role: producing food. Two of three essential elements in fertilizer—nitrogen and potassium—are nearly inexhaustible. Not so with the third. When phosphorus runs out, plant growth stops, and feeding 8 billion humans requires massive amounts of fertilizer. Morocco and the Western Sahara hold 70% to 80% of the world’s phosphate reserves, which may or may not run out in this century. After a short history of its production, Egan devotes most of the book to phosphate poisoning. All life requires phosphorus, including ancient blue-green algae. Thriving on a massive inflow of phosphate, they are destroying America’s rivers and lakes. They often cover bodies of water with “guacamole-thick,” toxic mats, and as they die, they suck out the oxygen, producing dead zones. Egan tells the tragic story of Lake Erie. For most of the 20th century, detergents, sewage, and industrial waste produced a widely publicized dead body of water. The Clean Water Act of 1972 was a significant milestone, and by the 1980s, Lake Erie was clean. However, by the turn of this century, it died again, the result of the act’s one yawning exemption: agriculture. Massive phosphate-rich fertilizer from farms and manure from titanic feed lots poured into rivers that emptied into the lake. After recounting the havoc phosphate wreaks elsewhere, the author turns to possible solutions. We waste about 80% of agricultural phosphate, so there is room for improvement. Unfortunately, many current efforts are confined to pilot projects—e.g., recycling sewage and manure—or are largely symbolic, such as banning phosphate from lawn fertilizer.
A fine account, worthy of fertile discussion, of yet another environmental disaster.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781324002666
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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