An engaging tome packed with statistics, personal stories, and helpful suggestions.
Gianturco and Sangster present a guide to organizing grassroots movements to help combat climate change.
The authors sound a powerful call to arms in the fight against global warming; as they write, “we can’t wait for others to figure this out for us.” Entries in their guide include “Increasing Awareness” and “Reducing Emissions,” which feature interviews with various female movers and shakers in the world of environmental health. A “What You Can Do” section ends each chapter, with suggestions like “make changes on your property to support ecosystems where you live,” and “get involved in your city or community’s planning council.” The interviews are edifying, including a conversation with Nelleke Van Der Puil, Vice President of Materials for LEGO. The toy company has pledged to be 100% sustainable by 2030 and has already created more than 80 LEGO brick shapes from sugar cane that look and feel identical to the old plastic ones. The authors offer statistics to support their assertion that women are especially effective leaders in combating global warming, and they make it as easy for the reader to get involved by including a QR code list that can be scanned to get started on various projects, including “help a woman entrepreneur bring solar power to her community in rural Africa” or “take action with a global network of women environmental and climate leaders.” A combination of regular printed text and handwritten slogans, peppered alongside wildly colorful pictures and photographs of activists around the world, creates a visually chaotic yet appealing layout. There are copious facts and figures provided, but the clearly defined blocks of text don’t overwhelm readers with large amounts of information all at once. Instead, this upbeat primer provides a fresh, inspiring, and fun look at how everyone can make an impact when it comes to protecting the planet.
An engaging tome packed with statistics, personal stories, and helpful suggestions.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 9781576879542
Page Count: 186
Publisher: powerHouse Books
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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