An admirable history of human ingenuity that does not claim it will overcome such looming crises as overpopulation and...
A solid, cheerful scientific account of how humans have dealt with disasters throughout history.
MacArthur Fellow DeFries (Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology/Columbia Univ.; Ecosystems and Land Use Change, 2004, etc.) emphasizes that progress in human history depended mostly on success in feeding ourselves. For thousands of years, hunter-gatherers ate well. The largely grain diet consumed after the arrival of agriculture 10,000 years ago was unhealthy, but its vast increase in quantity produced a population explosion, cities and civilizations. DeFries describes each subsequent advance as a “pivot” that inevitably overshoots, leading to “hatchets” (i.e., famine, drought, epidemics) overcome by advances (better ploughs, irrigation systems, sewers, fertilizers) that “ratchet” up our well-being but inevitably lead to further difficulties. Her first example of this process is the development of the potato, imported from South America after 1500. Nutritious and easy to grow, it became a staple, resulting in larger numbers of healthier Europeans. Readers are familiar with the 1845 potato blight that led to famine and depopulation, especially in Ireland. While historians usually stop there, DeFries points out that the blight still exists, but resistant strains and improved agricultural practices have restored production, even in Ireland. It wasn’t pretty, but human inventiveness applied to the potato led to a ratchet in our well-being. The Big Ratchet occurred during the second half of the 20th century when, thanks to pesticides, industrial farming, massive fertilizer use and genetic improvements, worldwide production of corn and rice nearly tripled and wheat more than doubled. Food is more abundant than ever, but other problems have emerged. “As long as civilization exists,” writes the author, “we will be grappling with how to hijack nature to feed ourselves.”
An admirable history of human ingenuity that does not claim it will overcome such looming crises as overpopulation and global warming.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-465-04497-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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
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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