bookshelf

WATER

Name: WATER
Author: Giulio Boccaletti
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4823-4

A BIOGRAPHY

by Giulio Boccaletti ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 2021

An ingenious lesson in geopolitics.

bookshelf

A tour de force world history focused on water and how we use it.

Climate scientist Boccaletti, chief strategy office of the Nature Conservancy, begins with an emphatic denial that “water is an inert backdrop on the stage of human events.” To prove his thesis, he delivers an expert water-centered history of human progress from the time we became sedentary 10,000 years ago. “The story of water,” writes the author, “is not technological, but political.” Agriculture produces far more food than hunting and gathering but requires massive amounts of water. Depending on rain is unreliable, so centuries ago, farmers began to harness the power of wells, local rivers, canals, and irrigation projects, which preoccupied early governments as much as warfare. Ambitious cultures paid attention to transportation by water, which is 10 times more efficient than by land. In Boccaletti’s view, an essential feature of the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century was increased security of property, which produced an explosion of investment in water infrastructure. By the end of the 19th century, he writes, the “great American rivers…would become the basis for the rise of the American republic as the dominant economy of the twentieth,” the “hydraulic century.” Hydropower, not hydrocarbons, powered the electrification of America. Opening with the spectacular Panama Canal in 1904, the U.S. spent much of the 20th-century attempting to repeat the success of the Tennessee Valley Authority and Hoover Dam around the world, with spotty success. These efforts peaked during the 1970s, after which water-led development seemed to fall out of fashion—until, out of the blue, China appeared on the scene, built the Three Gorges Dam (“the largest single piece of infrastructure in the world”), and took the lead in spreading its technology around the world. “It may still be that if the twentieth was the American Century,” writes Boccaletti in this astute global study, “the twenty-first will be the Chinese one.”

An ingenious lesson in geopolitics.

Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-5247-4823-4

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021

Categories:

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.

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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

bookshelf

THE BACKYARD BIRD CHRONICLES

by Amy Tan ; illustrated by Amy Tan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 23, 2024

An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.

bookshelf

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.