bookshelf

BANZEIRO ÒKÒTÓ

Name: BANZEIRO ÒKÒTÓ
Author: Eliane Brum
ISBN: 9781644452196

THE AMAZON AS THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

by Eliane Brum ; translated by Diane Whitty ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 7, 2023

A bleak, formidable chronicle of the increasingly deforested world of the Amazon.

bookshelf

A Brazilian reporter offers a “destructured” portrait of the Amazon’s collapse in terms of biosphere and Indigenous culture.

In her second book, following The Collector of Leftover Souls: Field Notes on Brazil’s Everyday Insurrections, Brum adopts an unconventional form to her work as a way of shedding the uncomfortable colonial connotations of her own Whiteness. The author, who lives in Altamira, in the Amazon jungle, writes with enormous empathy about the Indigenous people who, over the centuries, have learned to regard the rapacious Whites as “enemies” who have largely destroyed the Amazon rainforest. Brum describes her work with other researchers in Altamira, where she has studied historical ecology, “the field of study that explores how humans have interacted with the environment across space and time….Part of the Amazon is a cultural forest, meaning it has been sculpted over the course of thousands of years, mainly by humans, but also by nonhumans, the ones we call ‘animals,’ through their interactions with the environment.” As the author shows, most of the Indigenous people of the rainforest have been decimated by disease and violence. Brum is keenly aware of the disconnect between the White rhetoric about “ecology” and the Indigenous practice of being one with the forest, and she writes fervently about the massive deforestation that has been ongoing for decades. The author excoriates the right-wing administration of Jair Bolsonaro, elected in 2018, as having brought the country to a “climate emergency.” While connecting “with the forest and the women of the forest,” she writes, “deforestation, the destruction of nature, the contamination of rivers with mercury and pesticides—this became a lived experience of violence within my own body as well.” A relentless critic, she asserts that “exploitation by white people in the name of ‘progress’ is a political operation meant to erase everything that existed before.”

A bleak, formidable chronicle of the increasingly deforested world of the Amazon.

Pub Date: March 7, 2023

ISBN: 9781644452196

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Graywolf

Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
THE COLLECTOR OF LEFTOVER SOULS
by Eliane Brum ; translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty

bookshelf

ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

bookshelf

Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

bookshelf

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

bookshelf

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.