A somewhat muddled clarion for readers wishing to transform their impact upon a battered planet.
Self-styled environmental “adventure story” makes an impassioned plea for greater understanding and commitment.
Discover magazine columnist Kostigen attempts to show how our habits and consumption cause problems all over the world. Among other places, he visits Mumbai, India, to which the West exports enormous quantities of hazardous waste, and Borneo, where the global demand for palm oil is causing deforestation. “We are contributing to our own demise and health hazards by the products that we buy and the choices we make,” he writes. As an example, he points to the remote Alaskan village of Shishmaref, “the first community in the world to succumb to climate change,” where houses fall into the sea due to erosion of the permafrost; he agrees with residents’ assertions that this erosion is caused by pollution from “the lower forty-eight.” Kostigen illustrates the effects of Americans’ obsession with cheap goods by visiting Linfen City, China, “the dirtiest place on earth,” where coal plants fuel the manufacturing boom. He finds the tail end of consumerism in the Pacific Ocean, where he joins a researcher tracking a spiral of debris “twice the size of Texas” that generates plastic fragments that are replacing zooplankton in the oceanic food chain. The author’s approach produces mixed results. Colloquial prose conveys a great deal of information in a manner that often seems scattershot. Readers learn about per capita paper use, personal carbon emissions (a pound for every mile we drive), rates of recycling, the size of New York’s Fresh Kills landfill (world’s largest man-made structure), the effects of soybean farming upon the Amazon (negative) and many other subtopics. When Kostigen connects the dots to demonstrate the effects of human action, he often sounds pedantic, despite the melodramatic asides. Similar in content to Fred Pearce’s Confessions of an Eco-Sinner (2008), this is a less engaging book.
A somewhat muddled clarion for readers wishing to transform their impact upon a battered planet.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-158036-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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