Authoritative analysis of a crucial issue and the tough choices ahead, backed by solid research.
Going green will require new materials, but getting them raises difficult questions.
The long conflict between resource development and environmental protection shows no signs of abating, and a crucial new dimension has been added, according to Reuters senior correspondent Scheyder. If the U.S. wants to address climate change and transition to a sustainable economy, it must have supplies of the necessary materials. Lithium, a critical component of the batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage, is particularly crucial, but copper, cobalt, nickel, and manganese are also necessary. Most of these are difficult to mine, even harder to process, and the process requires massive investment. Several countries, including the U.S., have resources in the ground, but at present, China dominates production and processing. Among many other sites around the world, Scheyder follows a case concerning the huge Rhyolite Ridge lithium deposit in Nevada. The problem is that mining might endanger a unique buckwheat flower. Other proposed projects raise environmental concerns or could disturb sites sacred to Indigenous peoples. The mining companies say they can extract the resources responsibly, but opponents point out that their record is poor when it comes to conservation. The issue for environmental activists and regulatory agencies is one of competing priorities. Should we allow mining as a means of addressing climate change and hope it doesn’t create other problems, or prevent it and hope that China will be a reliable partner? Scheyder does not come down on either side; his intent is to highlight the difficulty of the decisions that leaders must make in the coming years. To his credit, he visited several of the proposed projects and talked to the people involved. The result is a well-informed, fair-minded book that deserves attention from many quarters.
Authoritative analysis of a crucial issue and the tough choices ahead, backed by solid research.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781668011805
Page Count: 384
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2023
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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