A straightforward and useful guide to better living.
Haley offers a short handbook for more ecologically sensible living.
“Continuing on with unlimited growth and overconsumption, while ignoring Earth’s biophysical constraints, makes no sense,” writes the author at the beginning of this concise book. In order to survive and thrive as a species, Haley contends, humans must do a better job of dealing with the many dangerous factors increasing in number and tempo in the modern world—not only economic, political, and social upheavals, but also looming ecological crises. The author economically outlines practical and philosophical measures ordinary people can take to make small differences in their own lives. He gives detailed, pragmatic guidance on a wide range of topics, from efficient water use to improved gardening techniques, all of which consistently involves the careful re-use of existing household materials. Take an empty plastic one-gallon milk jug, for instance; cut it in half and use the top part as a “mini-greenhouse” and the bottom as a planting pot. His advice on gardening is extensive, with tips like grinding up eggshells (for their calcium) as fertilizer or using coffee grounds for similar nutrients (he also suggests burying a whole banana or a whole egg about 10 inches into the soil six to eight months before germination). While dispensing all of these pointers, Haley employs prose that is brisk and authoritative, effectively supported by his deeper sociological beliefs. In a real sense, he contends, the current system makes its inhabitants slaves—to debt and to the rat race. And who benefits? “Overwhelmingly, it’s the Super-Rich, the Upper Crust, the new aristocrats,” he writes. “Bottom line: stop drinking the Propaganda Kool Aid.” His insistence on the vital importance of food, water, clean air, and good soil will strike many over-stressed readers as a clear-eyed and bracing reminder of the basics.
A straightforward and useful guide to better living.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9798883819192
Page Count: 101
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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