A fascinating treatment of both environmentalism and the structure of activism at the time.
The story of how April 22, 1970, began the tradition of Earth Day and helped to create the modern environmental movement.
On that date, Rome (Environmental History and Environmental Nonfiction/Univ. of Delaware; The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism, 2001) writes, a national teach-in took place, involving more than 12,000 events and many thousands of people from all walks of life. The prime mover was Democratic Sen. Gaylord Nelson, who issued the call for the event in November 1969, established a bare-bones national coordinating operation and secured funding. However, he refused to set any all-encompassing agenda or single national objective, leaving the direction of events and form of activities in the hands of local organizers. They succeeded beyond all expectations. The author has interviewed more than 120 participants, employing materials cross-checked through meticulous archive work. Rome discusses the relation between the Earth Day teach-in and the anti-war movement, as well as the women's movement. In those days, nuclear fallout from atmospheric testing was one of the main drivers of campaigns to clean up water supplies, ensure the safety and wholesomeness of milk, and protect children. The author details the political coalition that backed Nelson and its relation with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. He profiles selected events and speakers, the press corps relations to events, and the interaction with the Nixon administration, which later passed groundbreaking legislation. Activities on campuses were the major focus, and student organizing was the primary, but not exclusive, energizer.
A fascinating treatment of both environmentalism and the structure of activism at the time.Pub Date: April 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0809040506
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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