A knowledgeable and ultimately upbeat look at mitigating climate change.
Mebane offers strategies and insights for dealing with the climate emergency in this nonfiction work.
In his nonfiction debut, a collection of pieces previously published in Wall Street International Magazine, the author presents readers with reflections on many aspects of the ongoing and worsening climate emergency that becomes more apparent and unavoidable with every passing year. At the heart of his book is a resistance to the fatalism that tends to characterize discussions of the subject. The fatalism is understandable; the world’s industrialized nations are a long way from reaching the goals for lowered carbon emissions set by environmental scientists years ago as the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change in the lifetimes of the current generation’s grandchildren (if not earlier). The problem seems too big to be solved; as Mebane puts it, “only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid a climate disaster.” But the author has spent years in the environmental movement, including a stint spearheading Italy’s energy revolution in the 1980s, and he offers what he calls a “story of transformation—a story that proves that even in the face of daunting challenges, the power of human ingenuity and collaboration is essential.” In a series of beautifully illustrated (and well researched—the book’s reference section is extensive) chapters, Mebane looks at the practicalities of green investment in all its forms, from renewable energy sources to improved grids and electric vehicles to what he calls “forest therapy”—the power of green spaces to help with ailments like diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and asthma.
The tone of tough, informed optimism the author adopts is crucial to the convincing power of his argument: This work combines the research of a professional with the optimism of a true believer. Mebane never sugarcoats how dire the current climate situation is, particularly in the energy-hungry developing world. He acknowledges that we have “more unresolved problems than solutions” and notes that “the primary issue is how to help developing and evolving countries invest in mitigation and adaptation,” coming to the ethically inevitable conclusion that a large part of any such help will have to come from the developed countries that caused the climate crisis in the first place. Mebane is very skilled a deploying his many charts and graphs in ways that fit naturally into his text—readers never feel bludgeoned with facts or statistics, even though much of what the author is describing can get fairly technical. Readers skeptical of the industrialized world’s ability to reach “net zero” goals by target dates like 2050 will emerge from this book not only immeasurably better informed about every aspect of the challenge, but also invigorated to take it on. Mebane may have spent many years in Italy, but he himself is a Texan and the son of a petroleum geologist, and this background gives the fact-heavy sections of his book an air of authority and personal involvement. This tone is crucial for staving off the despair that readers might otherwise feel when the author hits them with plain talk about how bad things are: “Weather and climate-related disasters are growing exponentially,” he warns. “We may not know the hell we are creating.”
A knowledgeable and ultimately upbeat look at mitigating climate change.Pub Date: May 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781940387093
Page Count: 199
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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