A wide-ranging book that will inspire young professionals to focus on sustainability.
Waite (Sustainable Water Resources in the Built Environment, 2010) details the ways every worker can strive for sustainability.
In the foreword, the author states that the thesis of the book is that “sustainability can be incorporated into every imaginable career.” She then reacquaints readers with three traditional pillars of sustainability (society, economy, and environment), and tacks on a fourth: the consideration of future generations. From those, she builds her framework for promoting sustainability in the workplace, using the acronym “SURF”: “Supply chain,” “User,” “Relations,” and “Future.” “Supply chain” refers to all the “building blocks” of a product or service, right down to “the pen that consultants use to conduct their work”; “User” refers to how the consumer uses a product or service; “Relations” represents the morale and health of various stakeholders, including employees and people who live in the area of production; and “Future” stands for the company’s overall impact and progress. The author is an engineer with multiple degrees, including a master’s from the University of Cambridge, and parts of the book are written in a rather academic style. This suits the intended audience of students, but may prove too dense for casual readers. However, all will benefit from the more accessible interviews with professionals around the world, about how they’ve committed to sustainability; for instance, a Swedish doctor tells of how increased outpatient care decreased the hospital’s use of unsustainable materials. True to its thesis, the book covers a wide range of professional fields, including technology, health care, law, finance, education, and entertainment. Each chapter contains an outline of resources and concrete steps. Additionally, the author provides precise citations and sources. That said, one question that students may ask is how one can successfully advocate for change from an entry-level position, which the book doesn’t directly address.
A wide-ranging book that will inspire young professionals to focus on sustainability.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-138-20044-9
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
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