A readable, encouraging argument that climate activists will want to put to work.
The well-known investor and climate change activist delivers an optimistic but not altogether rosy manifesto on the need to combat climate change.
Steyer first had an inkling that something was wrong when he revisited a glacier he’d been enthralled by as a kid, only to discover that it was gone. This led to a revelation: “climate change was real—and happening much faster than most of us imagined at the time.” In 2012, he left the investment business and launched numerous enterprises, including a ranch “dedicated to proving that you can raise cattle and have a negative carbon footprint.” It helps to have a large pot of money to do such things, but Steyer insists that everyone has a role in undoing the worst effects of climate change. The author considers such efforts to be sound investment strategy. He highlights the work of climate entrepreneurs, such as two Massachusetts engineers who figured out a way to increase the efficiency and amount of energy—renewable, ideally—carried on power lines and a South Carolina man who has been “working to turn the old fertilizer plant into a sustainable hydroponics and aquaponics facility.” The author regularly sprinkles his revealing human-interest stories with accessible but sharp-edged asides on doing well by doing good: Investing in infrastructure makes good sense, for instance, whether in terms of time or money. Steyer’s case studies are refreshingly wide-ranging, whether concerning efforts to make “climate-conscious chocolate” or using AI to predict which days are going to be too cloudy to harvest solar energy. The author is abundantly clear that this will all require hard work and compromise, but it’s worth every ounce of effort and every penny. Pair this one with Drawdown, edited by Paul Hawken.
A readable, encouraging argument that climate activists will want to put to work.Pub Date: May 28, 2024
ISBN: 9781954118645
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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