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THE DEEPEST MAP

Name: THE DEEPEST MAP
Author: Laura Trethewey
ISBN: 9780063099951

THE HIGH-STAKES RACE TO CHART THE WORLD'S OCEANS

by Laura Trethewey ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 2023

Essential reading for environmentalists, armchair adventure divers, and those who care about the world’s oceans.

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An engrossing look at deep-sea exploration.

Mapping the ocean floor requires complex technology, politics, and patience, but it attracts brilliant scientists, entrepreneurs, and as many adventurous billionaires as space travel. Fortunately, it has also attracted journalist Trethewey, author of Imperiled Ocean. As she writes, the sentence, “We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean…appears in almost every article you read about the deep sea nowadays.” Yet life exists at the deepest points throughout the world: “blown-out, flattened volcanoes known as guyots, mud volcanos spewing methane, underwater lakes known as brine pools that are so salty they are lethal to almost every life-form except a few microorganisms that might be analogues to the aliens we seek on distant planets.” One of the author’s main characters is Texas financier Victor Vescovo. Already featured in Susan Casey’s fine recent book, The Underworld, Vescovo has outfitted a research ship, commissioned a cutting-edge submersible, and proceeded to dive to the deepest points in all five oceans. Since no one knew precisely where those points were, a good deal of mapping occurred along with pioneering scientific experiments and hair-raising adventures, all of which Trethewey vividly recounts. Researchers yearn for an alternative to survey ships, which cost upward of $50,000 per day. Unmanned drones work fairly well, but they have not caught on. Crowdsourcing accounts recruit fishing vessels, luxury yachts, cruise ships, and commercial shippers that routinely use sonar depth finders to contribute to the effort, and experts are digging through industrial archives for soundings filed and forgotten. Mapping the seafloor will bring benefits, but Trethewey reminds readers that intrepid explorers who mapped the continents were followed by colonists who proceeded to “consume, exhaust, and extinguish” the resources and human cultures they found. The deep sea is a treasure of pure metals. Commercial deep-sea mining is about to begin, and the process is horrendously destructive.

Essential reading for environmentalists, armchair adventure divers, and those who care about the world’s oceans.

Pub Date: July 11, 2023

ISBN: 9780063099951

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Harper Wave

Review Posted Online: May 2, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023

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ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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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

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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THE BACKYARD BIRD CHRONICLES

by Amy Tan ; illustrated by Amy Tan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 23, 2024

An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.

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A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.

In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”

An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.