A detailed view of a mostly unknown business that touches the lives of everyone, whether or not they ever dragged a trash...
The international recycling business comes under the probing and widely roaming yet ultimately friendly eye of a young journalist.
Bloomberg World View Shanghai correspondent Minter, who grew up working in his family’s junkyard, focuses on scrap metal since the most recycled product in the world, by weight, is an American car. The author concentrates mostly on the United States, a prodigious producer of scrap, and on China, the largest importer of American recyclables, and he fills his story with some colorful characters in both countries. For example, there is Leonard Fritz, the octogenarian founder of a major U.S. recycling firm who began his career in the 1930s scrounging in city dumps, and Johnson Zeng, a Chinese trader headquartered in Canada who travels the United States bargaining for scrap metal to ship to Guangdong Province. These two represent the shift that has taken place in recent decades from local junkyards to a multibillion-dollar global business. Besides exploring the financial side of this huge and profitable business, Minter ventures inside modern processing sites with enormous conveyer belts, sorting machines and shredders and into small workshops where women crouch around plastic bins and pick out bits of metal by hand. Minter acknowledges the damage done to people and the environment by low-tech electronics recycling in the developing world, but he asserts that “the worst, dirtiest recycling is still better than the very best clear-cut forest or the most up-to-date open-pit mine.” Still, Minter, who understands that not everything can be recycled and that some goods are far more difficult to recycle than others, concludes with some advice for concerned environmentalists and conservationists: Demand that companies design products that first can be repaired, then reused and finally recycled.
A detailed view of a mostly unknown business that touches the lives of everyone, whether or not they ever dragged a trash and/or recycle bin out to the curb.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-791-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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