Thoughtful environmental reportage suggesting that the fate of trees is the fate of all life.
A walk in the woods with an environmental journalist and natural-history writer reveals that the forested world is in grave danger.
As Oregon-based naturalist Mathews (Natural History of the Pacific Northwest Mountains, 2017, etc.) writes, there are 113 species of pine tree, the most abundant and various of any conifer genus. All are in trouble to one extent or another because of climate change, from saplings to “living pine trees older than the Egyptian pyramids.” The author roams the world and the scientific literature to examine the many threats that pines face and their previous adaptations. The logic of the lodgepole, for instance, is impressive: Its cone carries a resin that melts at 113 degrees Fahrenheit, protecting the seeds inside the cone from fire. “The fire kills the pines but melts their cone-sealing resin,” he writes; “the cone scales open over several days or weeks, shedding seeds upon a wide-open seedbed.” Massive fires being an increasingly common phenomenon, particularly in the West, this adaptation is highly useful. On that note, Mathews observes, many forest scientists believe that there’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in the fire regime—i.e., the kinds of dense forests we cultivate demand huge fires. American logging trucks seem somehow incomplete without their loads of giant trees, after all, whereas European foresters favor smaller trees that wouldn’t make for ship masts or I-beams but that do just fine to make studs. In many places, the destruction of fire pales next to that of pine borer beetles, both a harbinger and an effect of climate change. It’s difficult to control both, though, as Mathews writes; the cost of protecting homes in forests by doing such things as burying power lines is often so high that people have little motivation apart from self-preservation to do that necessary work. And, asks the author, “if self-preservation isn’t a motivation, what would be?” His book sounds a timely warning to pay more heed to the health of the woodlands.
Thoughtful environmental reportage suggesting that the fate of trees is the fate of all life.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64009-135-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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