A fact-heavy specialist’s guide to improving wildfire policies in a rapidly warming world.
Auchterlonie and Lehman offer an overview of forest fire management on United States public forest land.
The authors begin their nonfiction debut starkly: “The Earth is on fire.” Wildfires, they report, raged on every continent in 2020 and destroyed nearly 1 billion acres, 10 million in the U.S. alone, an area the size of Maryland and Delaware combined. And the severity of the problem is only increasing: Since 1970, the annual average temperature in the U.S. has risen by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit; earlier snowmelt leads to drier forests, which result in more and worse fires. These fires have an enormous impact on wildland-urban interface areas, destroying thousands of homes and forcing thousands of people to evacuate. “Wildfires impact over half the landmass of the United States,” Auchterlonie and Lehman write. In a series of concise, well-documented, and superbly illustrated chapters (graphs, charts, and full-color photos run throughout the book), they describe the history of the government’s responses to such dangers and propose possible improvements to those measures. The authors bullet point many of their key statistics and walk readers through their sources, governmental and otherwise, the goal being always to inform, never to entertain: Readers will need to be significantly invested in the topic of wildfire prevention and control before they dive into what is essentially a protracted white paper on the subject. But Auchterlonie and Lehman are clearly not writing primarily with a general readership in mind; this text, with its prodigious facts and figures all carefully and colorfully laid out, is obviously intended for specialists, frontline responders, and, especially, policymakers who could improve laws and regulations regarding everything from forestry to response protocols. This should be required reading for every incoming U.S. secretary of the interior.
A fact-heavy specialist’s guide to improving wildfire policies in a rapidly warming world.Pub Date: July 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781637557839
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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