Profound cultural scope deepens Hawken’s exceptional science writing.
An impassioned call for a return to traditional environmental stewardship.
It is hard to overestimate how the accelerating collapse of ecosystems and species is related to how modern societies and their increasingly homogenized languages are losing the deep sense of place critical to protecting the land. So argues environmental activist Hawken, who says we ignore the knowledge embedded in Indigenous languages and customs at our peril. These marginalized or endangered cultures whose languages guided traditional guardianship of the land possess the ages-old understanding of how to avoid the calamities of environmental decline in the first place. In a scathing, if familiar, indictment of the denatured Western food industry, industrial farming, chemical companies, and ruinous logging and mining—among other depredations—Hawken marshals indisputable evidence that continuing on our current path is suicidal. He knows full well how entrenched the “overwhelming array of industrial forces lined up against the living world” can be and that most people simply do not understand the planetary and social risks we confront. It is the real subject of a book whose scaffolding is the pervasiveness and functions of the element of carbon in planetary life, as well as the challenges it presents. Hawken’s survey of the science involved is as cogent as it is extensive, from the macro to the micro, and it’s often a fascinating journey. There’s a very fine book of popular science here that sometimes struggles with its own ideological noise. Were it not for this, the book would be in the same class as Zoë Schlanger’s recent The Light Eaters, with which it shares broad similarities. But for all the depressing realities, Hawken sees reasons for hope that we will reverse our heedlessly destructive ways, even in the current political climate.
Profound cultural scope deepens Hawken’s exceptional science writing.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780525427445
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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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