An urgent endorsement of efforts to remake a doomed fossil-fuel economy before it’s too late.
A noted activist elucidates the program of environmental and economic reform that is being largely ignored on Capitol Hill.
According to Rifkin (The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism, 2014, etc.), the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, we are within a degree or two of temperature rise before we see the cataclysm of “runaway feedback loops and a cascade of climate-change events that would decimate the Earth’s ecosystems.” The possibility of such devastation, he argues, is not lost on heartland voters who, though perhaps otherwise conservative, are increasingly alarmed by severe weather events and other clear signs of a changing climate regime, manifest in expensive destruction of life and property. Against this, Rifkin notes trends among younger citizens to participate in a so-called sharing economy, with shared housing, office space, vehicles, tools, and the like, “allowing the human race to use far less of the resources of the Earth while passing on what they no longer use to others and, by doing so, dramatically reducing carbon emissions.” It will take more than that, of course: Infrastructure must be overhauled, which would add jobs to the economy, and old ways of doing things must be cast aside. There’s not much time to do so. Rifkin projects that without change, “fossil-fuel civilization” has less than 10 years of life; he adds that this change “is inevitable, despite any efforts by the fossil fuel industries to forestall it.” The author then enumerates a 21-point program around Democratic proposals spearheaded by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey, closing with the fond hope that a “biosphere consciousness" is emerging. A little hectoring alternating with wishful thinking goes a long way, but Rifkin’s point that something needs to be done—immediately—is well taken. Better a Chicken Little than a Pollyanna any day of the week.
An urgent endorsement of efforts to remake a doomed fossil-fuel economy before it’s too late.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-25320-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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