A solid and cleareyed look at developments in building, transportation, and energy technology.
An engineer and a municipal administrator analyze the future of sustainable building and transportation.
In this science and policy book, debut author Duncan and Webber look at trends in transportation and construction, with a focus on sustainability and efficiency. They offer predictions as to how the industries will evolve and become more entwined in the near future. The volume opens with an overview of what the authors call “megatrends”—the developments in efficiency, automation, and convergence that have driven and continue to propel the transportation and building sectors. Subsequent sections apply those megatrends to the future of building and transportation in greater detail, covering recent innovations, those currently in experimental stages, and potentially groundbreaking changes that still exist only in conceptual form. Each chapter opens with a short vignette (“The bedside alarm sounded its usual aggressive tone and Bob stumbled out of bed and made his way to the bathroom”) that becomes more technologically advanced over the course of the section (“Still hungover from the night before, he hoped the toilet wouldn’t tell the refrigerator not to order any more beer”). As the work gets further into the futures of both building and transportation, the book posits that the two sectors will become increasingly entangled, powered by a rising interconnectedness and their relationships to the system of energy production and distribution, which will undergo its own related evolution. Though the authors wryly acknowledge that the events of the past year suggest the limits of their predictive capacity, the volume concludes that advancements in building and transportation will be major drivers of decreased carbon emissions and will have a net positive impact on the world.
Duncan and Webber do a particularly good job of concisely summing up complex developments (“We can postulate that the purpose of technology is conversion efficiency: the efficient conversion of any form of energy from Form A to Form B”). They also deftly ground the book in engineering history, with frequent references to such thinkers as R. Buckminster Fuller and concepts like Moore’s Law, explaining how familiar ideas will shape future developments. Although the volume focuses primarily on a descriptive approach to technological change, the authors do touch on the policy implications of the world they describe, particularly the need to accommodate workers displaced by automation and shifts in energy demand. The book presents an astute, realistic perspective on likely technological innovations—without treating the changes the authors anticipate as complete panaceas—acknowledging the complex web of tradeoffs that makes planning for the future a challenge. For instance, electric cars decrease gasoline consumption but add to demands on a power grid that relies on other fossil fuels. Readers will not walk away from the work with an absolute certainty about what will happen in the building and transportation industries in coming years, but they will feel well informed and prepared to discuss the implications of widespread technological change.
A solid and cleareyed look at developments in building, transportation, and energy technology.Pub Date: July 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73442-902-2
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Roger Duncan Consulting
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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