Martin concludes that things may just work out. Fans of H.G. Wells will enjoy the argument, which is definitely not for...
There’s good news and bad news: We’re destroying the planet, and some of us are going to succeed.
There’s more than a little Buckminster Fullerish optimism—and off-kilter ideas—in Martin’s take on the state of the world, though the reader has to work through some very grim statistics indeed. For one, it takes 1,000 tons of water to make the ton of grain necessary to produce 18 pounds of beef—and around the planet, we’re using 160 billion tons more water each year than is replenished by rainfall. For another, “one-third of the world’s forest areas has disappeared since 1950, and the destruction is accelerating.” To top it off, China and India are becoming well-to-do enough to want a car in every garage, which will exacerbate the fuel crisis. Enter technology, soft (solar panels) and hard (genetic retooling) alike, to the rescue. Martin, a former IBM engineer who lives part-time on a waterless island off Bermuda, marvels that America does not harvest rainwater, though it is easy to do so; he urges that China and other nations move to nuclear power rather than burn more coal, which “would have a devastating effect on the world’s climate”; and the like. Moreover, he opens a window onto some weird-science possibilities, including “electronic brain appendages” that may help us think our way through to a solution of trifles like global warming and mass extinction. In the face of doom, Martin has a positive outlook that sometimes verges on Pollyanna territory, as when he predicts that by 2050, “most of the world will be familiar with its diverse cultures,” so much so that we’ll stop shooting at each other. That, and the prospect that medicine will make Methuselahs of today’s youngsters, may mean yet more people on this busy planet.
Martin concludes that things may just work out. Fans of H.G. Wells will enjoy the argument, which is definitely not for Luddites.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2006
ISBN: 1-57322-323-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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