Expert and invigorating.
Comprehensive guide to America’s looming energy emergency, including suggested actions that the authors believe will avert a global crisis.
War, pestilence, starvation and the collapse of the global economy are just some of the consequences of not moving aggressively toward energy independence, assert Congressman McNerney—a member of House committees on Global Warming and Energy Independence and on Science and Technology—and science and technology journalist Cheek. They outline the many dangers of ignoring the Peak Oil Theory, which predicts that the world’s oil output will begin to decline in the near future. With growing economies like China increasing their fossil fuel use and developing strategic alliances with oil-rich countries that are not allies of the United States, the authors argue, there is no time to waste in implementing lower emission standards and greater use of alternative energy sources, including solar, wind, water, biofuel, geothermal and possibly nuclear power. Oil dependence affects citizens’ daily lives in myriad ways, impacting not just transportation but the manufacture of medicines, maintenance of the military and national security, preservation of agriculture and the food supply and the heating and cooling of homes and businesses. Unless tough standards are met in the next decade, the United States will assume an increasingly weak position within the global oil marketplace. The number of barrels of crude oil produced domestically is already far short of U.S. consumption rates, and progress in Washington has been hindered by recent administrations unduly influenced by the oil industry. The authors present a plan to reduce oil dependence from OPEC nations by 75 percent by the year 2020. If the incoming administration can immediately prioritize the development of clean, abundant, natural energy, they write, the United States can emerge victorious from this transition period and retain its reputation as the world’s most innovative and autonomous country, “the peace power of the twenty-first-century world.”
Expert and invigorating.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8144-1372-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: AMACOM
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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