A scientifically sophisticated, well-considered contribution to the literature of movement and environmental change.
Science journalist Shah looks at the biology and human ecology of migration, a topic overladen these days with all sorts of political shadings.
The child of Indian immigrants, Shah—author of the excellent and ever more timely book Pandemic (2016)—returns with an incisive examination of migration, which she considers a phenomenon both biological and cultural. Many bird species, for example, travel great distances in annual migrations, and a delicate butterfly species with which the author opens her narrative exhibits “a consistent pattern of movement across half of North America.” We have been taught to view such movement as potentially perilous: Invading species arrive, we think, and immediately disturb pristine ecosystems. Even Shah admits that “the idea of migration as a disruptive force has fueled my own work as a journalist.” Yet nothing could be more natural than animals moving in response to changes in environmental conditions. As the author shows, only a tiny fraction of relocated species displace others, an act that is consistent with Darwinian theories of natural selection. “Condemning newcomers as inevitably disruptive,” she writes, pointedly, “blames them for all transgressions committed by 1 percent or less of their members.” When it comes to humans, she writes, the topic becomes more fraught. In a time when humans are increasingly on the move, whether because of political or economic displacement or because their homes are becoming uninhabitable thanks to climate change, politicians such as Donald Trump are using the tiny number of problem-makers, real or potential, to keep the vast majority of law-abiding would-be citizens from making their homes in new lands. This ignores millennia of human movement from one place to the next. Even though “over the long history of life on earth, [migration’s] benefits have outweighed its costs,” nationalists still create xenophobic, incoherent policies, agreeing only that strangers are to be despised.
A scientifically sophisticated, well-considered contribution to the literature of movement and environmental change. (b/w maps)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-197-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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
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