Of particular interest to readers interested in environmental issues and public liability law.
An environmental catastrophe and its human consequences.
Environmental disasters are, regrettably, far from uncommon, but the calamity around the town of Kingston in Tennessee in 2008 was particularly awful for its scale and reverberations. The incident was caused when an embankment holding back a huge amount of coal sludge broke, resulting in a wave of muck that eventually covered and contaminated 300 acres and resulted in more than 50 deaths. Sullivan, an experienced journalist, focuses on the lengthy legal case brought by lawyers representing the community against the gigantic Tennessee Valley Authority and one of its contractors, Jacobs Engineering. The issue was initially considered to be one of property damage, but it did not take long for serious health problems to appear, especially among the cleanup workers who inhaled coal ash. Sullivan delves deep into the background of the event, examining the technical issues as well as the legal aspects of the civil action suit, which was eventually successful. He makes no real attempt to be impartial; he is clearly on the side of the plaintiffs. He states at the outset that “Jacobs Engineering and TVA dispute much of my reporting” but elaborates on this primarily in a Notes section at the end. He amasses a huge amount of information, and while this helps him build a strong case, it also bogs down the narrative in places. Another problem is that the book's three long parts each cover a lengthy period, making it at times a difficult read. Nevertheless, the overall impact of the story remains strong, thanks to Sullivan’s careful research and empathy for the disaster’s victims.
Of particular interest to readers interested in environmental issues and public liability law.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9780593321119
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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