Global warming on the home front.
As climate change begins to bite, long-predicted upheavals are underway.
Journalist Lustgarten, author of Run to Failure and China’s Great Train, begins with the usual bad news. Today, less than 1% of the planet is too hot to support civilization. By 2070, it will be 20%. Where will those people go? Tolerable living conditions in the U.S. “will jump dramatically northward,” with states along the Canadian border suffering the least damage. Sea levels have risen more than nine inches since 1960—and two feet in Louisiana, the worse-affected state, drowning a coastal area bigger than Delaware. Rapid global heating produces hot but also extremely unpredictable weather, and hurricanes, forest fires, and droughts have become routine. Traveling the nation, Lustgarten interviews experts and victims to paint a grim but fact-based picture. Responding to catastrophic losses, insurers who have not gone bankrupt have raised premiums or stopped issuing policies in certain areas. Responding to pleas from property owners, elected officials have exacerbated the problem by introducing subsidized taxpayer-financed insurance. Lustgarten is not the first to point out that this “sends the wrong message,” encouraging Americans to remain in dangerous areas. Census data show that Americans continue to move toward heat, coastlines, and drought. These trends have burdened state budgets, especially in places like Florida; since Hurricane Andrew in 1992, five million people have moved to coastal counties, assured of cheap insurance. When Ron DeSantis decided to stem the money hemorrhage, angry homeowners quickly changed his mind. Lustgarten finishes with the traditional gloom (“We’ve failed for a generation already”) but adds that aggressive action can still mitigate the damage and even revive neglected regions such as the Rust Belt. This means building sea walls but also investing in housing, infrastructure, and social programs to accommodate those already on the move.
Global warming on the home front.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780374171735
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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