Demography and graphic design meet in an extraordinarily revealing book.
An eye-opening visual look at the assumptions and trends that lie beneath how the modern world ticks.
In 2019, writes geographer Cheshire, the FAA tracked 11.2 million commercial flights over U.S. airspace. That’s an astonishing number. More astonishing is the fact that this number was only a modest increase over 2009, yet during that decade, passenger numbers had grown by a third. This suggests that those additional millions of passengers were packed like sardines inside those planes, which “seemed like a good strategy until the pandemic.” Working with former National Geographic designer Uberti, Cheshire serves up revealing data about the modern world, his eye set on patterns that illustrate changes in our time. For instance, the authors track the signals sent from mobile phones to monitor migration patterns, which figure into a body of statistical and visual data that “illustrate how a warming planet affects everything from hurricanes to the hajj.” Eschewing what mathematician Edward Tufte calls “chartjunk,” Cheshire and Uberti look with admirable clarity at other patterns over time. One map, for instance, depicts the number of “vagrancy houses” made available in Cheshire’s native England to the homeless a century ago. The program involved removing these people from London, but at least they had somewhere to go, even if that somewhere amounted to “holding pens.” With economic decline and social change, the number of such people has mounted today, even as 216,000 houses sat vacant across the country. Using such data to point to a problem and a solution at once, Cheshire asks, “Why not make the housing permanent?” In a work that brilliantly demonstrates how big data and its visual representation can be put to work, the authors analyze the shift from rural to urban residence across the world, the mixed-race DNA that most of us carry without necessarily knowing it, the connections of rivers to commerce, and many other matters of compelling interest.
Demography and graphic design meet in an extraordinarily revealing book.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-393-65151-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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