A rightfully urgent call to ban the Bomb—and stat.
Nobody ever said a nuclear holocaust would be nice. Here’s a book to prove it.
The odds are depressingly good that someone, sometime, somewhere will deploy a nuclear weapon. British environmental journalist Lynas reckons it at a probability of about 63% within a century; given that it’s been 80 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that gives us until 2045 to test the prediction. And given wars in Ukraine, Syria, Palestine, and other sundry odd places, the odds may be poorer still, which, by Lynas’ account, ought to put us to worrying about nuclear war more than we do. There’s plenty to worry about, as Lynas counts off the sequelae in grim detail: There’s nuclear winter, for instance, which means that much of the Northern Hemisphere will undergo a new ice age (which is at least a break from global warming). With that ice will come starvation, since crops won’t grow, which raises another unwholesome prospect: Once the canned foods are gone, “the absolute last resort is the consumption of human corpses.” A person might want to go vegan, since those corpses will be irradiated and probably highly carcinogenic. And so on. Lynas takes a too-long side tour into the asteroid-induced nuclear winter that did in the dinosaurs and sent up a tsunami that crested as high as Mont Blanc, but the point is well taken; nukes will do the same trick, and, as the kids say, FAFO. Much of this isn’t new; Jonathan Schell was making many of the same points in his 1982 book, The Fate of the Earth. However, Lynas does a good job of sounding alarms anew and calling for meaningful action: “We cannot be another movement of hippies, eating vegan food in protest camps with smelly compost toilets, and obsessing over women-only spaces,” he writes; instead, we need to bring science and realpolitik to bear if we’re to survive.
A rightfully urgent call to ban the Bomb—and stat.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781399410519
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury Sigma
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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