A striking manifesto for sweeping change.
How to save life on Earth.
British science writer Vince, a former editor at Nature and New Scientist and author of Adventures in the Anthropocene, mounts compelling dual arguments: Global warming must be controlled, and on a planet beset by fire, heat, drought, and flood, mass migration will be necessary for survival. “Fleeing the tropics, the coasts and formerly arable lands, huge populations will need to seek new homes,” the author predicts; “you will be among them, or you will be receiving them.” In a text that bristles with urgency, Vince counters “anti-migration rhetoric and misinformation” with abundant evidence showing that immigrants make positive economic, social, and cultural contributions to the society in which they settle. With an aging population throughout Europe, she notes, “there’s an economic imperative to increase immigration—to keep the elderly dependency ratios low.” Welcoming these migrants, however, requires a sea change in attitude about national identity. “We need to look at the world afresh,” Vince writes, “and develop new plans based on geology, geography and ecology—not politics.” Vince suggests establishing a “global UN Migration Organization” to manage relocation of refugees and formulate a humane immigration policy. Furthermore, with most migrants gravitating to cities, crucial changes must occur in infrastructure and urban planning. Migrant cities, she writes, must be “affordable, ideally use no more electricity or water than they generate themselves, not contribute greenhouse gas emissions, and not worsen biodiversity loss.” The redistribution of populations, however, will not reverse unsustainable behaviors and policies, and Vince devotes much of her well-researched book to considering bold changes. “The first step,” she writes, “is to decarbonize electricity production; the next is to power everything possible with electricity,” including electrified public and personal transport. She predicts that humans’ diet necessarily will become “plant, fungus, algae-based,” with insects “the most versatile and appropriate livestock.” Geoengineering innovations may deflect heat away from Earth, and wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal power can obviate the burning of fossil fuels.
A striking manifesto for sweeping change.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-82161-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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