A robust look at where the juice flows around the planet—and its planetary implications.
Shocking revelations about electricity, “the apex predator of the energy kingdom.”
Vladimir Lenin once said, “communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” Energy journalist Bryce (Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong, 2014, etc.) writes that there are three categories by which the 200-odd nations of the world can be classified: the “unplugged countries,” with electricity use under 1,000 kilowatt hours/capita/year; the “low-watt” countries, from 1,000 to 4,000 kWh; and the “high-watt” countries, where electricity use exceeds 4,000 kWh annually. In keeping with other economic gauges, it’s disheartening to note that almost half of the planet’s population falls into the first category, while many former communist nations are in the second, and the third, not surprisingly, has a far higher average GDP than the rest—and comprises less than 20% of the world’s total population. Like so much else in the world, electricity is unevenly distributed, with marked disparities. Not that anyone should feel secure in the wealthier domains: Climate change is wreaking havoc with the grid while “saboteurs are constantly probing for weaknesses.” With a growing world population, especially in developing countries, increased demand will prove a problem. As in past books, Bryce considers renewables to be less efficient than the fossil fuels that seem not yet to have reached their peak, to say nothing of nuclear power, which he advocates, deeming himself a “proponent of what I call N2N, or natural gas to nuclear.” As he writes, “the hard reality is that there are no quick or easy solutions. Energy transitions take decades.” That more fossil fuels mean more climate change doesn’t seem to faze the author, but hard geopolitical and economic realities do: Iraq is now dependent on Iran for about 15% of its energy “despite objections from the Donald Trump administration,” and the “Giant Five” tech companies—Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft—“are creating their own private grids,” becoming, “in effect, electric utilities.”
A robust look at where the juice flows around the planet—and its planetary implications.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61039-749-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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