Excellent environmental journalism, light on optimism.
A climate change polemic that attempts to be less apocalyptic than most.
Early on in his latest book, award-winning nature writer Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains, presents a droll cartoon illustrating how to write a nature essay in six panels: “Find something. Contemplate it. Express awe. Quote Thoreau. Describe threats. End hopefully.” Despite admitting that “my faith in number six is wavering,” he aims to describe what the world will be like when his daughter reaches his age, in 2063. A veteran journalist, he has no trouble finding bad news. Climate change has damaged places he has lived—hurricanes in North Carolina, fires in Colorado—and he chronicles his travels to Norfolk, Virginia, where Atlantic tides are already rolling through downtown, and southern Louisiana. The latter has become a poster child for environmental ruin after a massive oil spill followed by a steady annual ooze and five recent hurricanes that have left a landscape of abandoned towns, crumbling homes, a forest of oil rigs that continue to provide close to 20% of U.S. oil production, and countless dead birds and other wildlife. Perhaps uniquely in the U.S., few quarrel with estimates that the region will be underwater within a century. Despite a few bright spots—e.g., Glen Canyon’s lake in Arizona is not doing badly—the future looks grim, as the environment remains a low priority for most Americans and the subject itself has been swept up in witless sectarian politics. Gessner quotes veteran geoscientist and climate activist Orrin Pilkey: “What we are experiencing, along with the rising sea, is a tsunami of anti-intellectualism. Science is at a new low in the public’s view….I think the coal and oil companies, aided by politicians, have done fundamental damage to science in this country. It’s true we are not always right. But we deserve to be listened to.”
Excellent environmental journalism, light on optimism.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781948814812
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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