A reasonable argument directed at a lay audience, many of whom have already made up their minds.
A rational if somewhat unlikely strategy to reverse global warming using current technology and without self-denial.
According to Steven Pinker, who contributes the foreword, Goldstein (Emeritus, International Relations/American Univ.; Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide, 2011, etc.) and Qvist, a Swedish engineer and clean energy consultant, offer “climate change for grown-ups. Rather than starting from baby steps and hope these add up, it starts from where we need to end up and asks how we can get there.” The world’s energy mostly goes into electricity generation, transportation, and heating. The future requires electricity produced without burning fossil fuels. After the usual gloomy introduction—the fastest-growing source of carbon dioxide in the world remains coal—the authors point out that several countries (e.g., Sweden and France) are steadily reducing carbon dioxide production without inconveniencing their prosperous, nonabstemious citizenry. Writers in this genre often prefer solutions that require personal actions (recycling, smaller cars) that have little impact, a frugal lifestyle that most people oppose, or a miraculous revolution in energy storage that is essential to making solar or wind power practical 24 hours per day. The authors argue for nuclear power, and the facts are certainly on their side. Nuclear plants are safer. Aside from producing global warming, the soot, heavy metals, sulfur, and nitrous oxides poured into the air from fossil fuel plants kill thousands every day from cancer and lung disease. Rapid decarbonization of the atmosphere—the only action that will reverse global warming—requires nuclear power. Despite an avalanche of facts and statistics, the authors are taking a “pro” position on a debate they largely lost 30 years ago. Opposition to nuclear power exerts great political influence on most developed democratic nations, and some (Germany, Switzerland) have sworn to eliminate it.
A reasonable argument directed at a lay audience, many of whom have already made up their minds.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5417-2410-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
