Green-minded readers will learn much from Gonen’s investigations.
A sensible manifesto on behalf of recycling and other means of reducing waste.
Appointed New York City deputy commissioner for sanitation, recycling, and sustainability during the Bloomberg administration, Gonen is a longtime advocate of environmental restoration and protection with a sharp eye for practical tactics. As he learned in NYC, because corporations depend on taxpayer dollars to dispose of their waste, “a modern form of socialism” supporting ostensible champions of the free market, the public sector spends huge amounts of money on disposal that might better be used to upgrade infrastructure. Here, examining many corners of the economy, the author agitates for adopting “circular methods of production, distribution, consumption, and reuse of products and materials.” The pandemic provides a case in point: Gonen argues that the shortage of personal protective equipment could have been alleviated if single-use masks were not trashed but instead sterilized with a hydrogen peroxide mist. “Throwing away PPE,” he writes, “was a legacy of a horribly inefficient business model, not a medical requirement.” Throughout, the author examines the role of government for good and ill. He lauds the victory garden program and waste-reduction measures of the Depression era while noting that after World War II, federal programs “helped supercharge consumption” by making cheap credit easily available and pushing goods with planned obsolescence built into their DNA. Gonen also praises responsive industries—e.g., paper manufacturers, who, though likely glad that the paperless office has not come to pass, are taking care to plant two trees for every one felled and inventors who tinker with means to convert abundant materials, such as cow (and human) waste, into biogas. The author closes by urging businesses to adopt circular models if only as a selling point, since consumers are increasingly demanding environmental responsibility. Advocating a point without descending into mere rhetoric, the author ventures a well-reasoned case for changing our ways as producers and consumers.
Green-minded readers will learn much from Gonen’s investigations.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-19184-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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