Readers of this overheated but often on-the-mark polemic will conclude that the safest tactic is organic food and a fly...
“We spend our lives living in a chemical soup,” writes Vallianatos (This Land Is Their Land: How Corporate Farms Threaten the World, 2006, etc.), who was a risk evaluator for the Environment Protection Agency from 1979 to 2004. With Jenkins (Journalism/Univ. of Delaware; What’s Gotten Into Us: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World, 2011), he excoriates the agency for routinely yielding to outside pressure in regulating pesticides and other environmental pollutants.
Founded in 1970, the EPA inherited Department of Agriculture personnel who brought their enthusiasm for chemical farming. Dedicated scientists arrived, but their findings are never the last word. That belongs to their superiors, who weigh evidence of an agent’s toxicity against industry spokesmen and fierce opposition of administration and Congress to “burdensome government regulation” and “attacks on the farmer.” The authors recite a depressing litany of poisons approved despite damning, inadequate or fraudulent testing—and often no testing at all. EPA whistle-blowers, always portrayed as heroes, are usually ignored, demoted or fired. Although President Ronald Reagan’s effort to abolish the EPA failed, he weakened it dramatically. Abolition remains the goal of many Republicans, while Democrats oppose this plan. However, Democratic presidents, Barack Obama included, have proven a disappointment. Sadly, a minority of environmentalists excepted, Americans rarely pester their representatives about this subject or contribute to their campaigns. Agribusinesses and chemical manufacturers do both. Even an impartial EPA official—rare in this damning indictment—hears mostly one side of an argument. In the obligatory how-to-fix-it conclusion, Vallianatos and Jenkins suggest that the EPA should be run like the Food and Drug Administration and Federal Reserve—by experts, not political appointees. This is not likely.
Readers of this overheated but often on-the-mark polemic will conclude that the safest tactic is organic food and a fly swatter.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-914-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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