Curing the earth's environmental woes will require nothing less than a whole new mindset, argues former New York Times environmental reporter Shabecoff (A Fierce Green Fire, 1992) in this free-ranging, informed book. Shabecoff was asked by the secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development to chronicle the doings of the Secretariat in preparation for, and during, the 1992 summit in Rio: unconditional access, working independently, unanswerable to the U.N., a fly on the wall. What he saw made him think long and hard on just how much economics has to do with the state of the environment—the economic causes of environmental decline and the environmental causes of economic dysfunction—and how the structural flaws in our value systems and political institutions lead inevitably to human misery and environmental degradation. Shabecoff argues that as long as poverty, hunger, disease, and ignorance run rampant, and until links are drawn between these conditions, the economic imperatives of our fossilized capitalism, and the willful abuse of the environment, it will be understandable that many humans won't give a fig about the ecological integrity of the planet. He insists on the necessity of global population control and an equitable distribution of wealth. Since the Rio summit, and more to the point since the Stockholm conference on the environment back in 1972, Shabecoff has found little to make him happy with the world: still practicing the same economics, employing the same technologies, politics as usual, factional strife, corruption. He is thrilled by a few thriving grassroots sustainable-development operations—marrying human betterment with ecological consciousness—but will that ever make a dent in the problems of a China or an India? Shabecoff isn't sanguine about the prospects. A call for new values and laws, redirected politics and technology. Old advice, if sharply delivered, smartly framed. But the question still goes begging: How?
Pub Date: June 14, 1996
ISBN: 0-87451-688-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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
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