Excellent natural history and more optimistic than usual.
A passionate argument for protecting the world’s rapidly shrinking wilderness.
A century ago, 15% of the Earth’s surface was farm or pasture; today, it’s 77%. Many experts maintain that this loss of natural land as well as the “sixth extinction” and all the effects of climate change have passed the point of no return. Former New Yorker staff writer Hiss disagrees, and he describes a campaign to protect 50% of the world’s land, a plan that may strike many as absurd—until they read his cogent argument. Three great forested areas—Siberia, the Amazon, and the North American Boreal (in Canada and Alaska)—make up most of the world’s wilderness. “Siberia is 60 percent cut over,” writes the author, “and so is more than 20 percent of the Amazon, where the rate of deforestation is spiking.” The Boreal, however, is 85% intact. Since human activities account for less than 40% of our continent, and 15% is already protected, the author’s plan is feasible. Readers accustomed to a litany of doom will discover a modest amount of good news. Many well-financed environmental organizations are working toward the 50% goal, and, unlike the case with reducing global warming, governments tend to be amenable. The best scenarios have occurred in Canada and Australia, which have returned large amounts of land to previously displaced Native populations. The U.S. government is unlikely to buy into the entire plan, but a combination of activists, naturalists, and a few billionaires are making progress. Hiss illustrates his thought-provoking arguments with a handful of North American projects, including a major expansion of the Appalachian Trail, rejuvenation of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, restoration of the vast pine forests in the Southeast, and conversion of Yellowstone into a Greater Yellowstone protected area, essential to preserve its diminishing species. With its combination of passion, inspiration, and rigor, this makes a good companion to Bill Gates’ How To Avoid a Climate Disaster.
Excellent natural history and more optimistic than usual.Pub Date: March 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-65481-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
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PERSPECTIVES
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
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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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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