An accessible combination of policy analysis and reminiscences from a half-century–long forestry career.
A retired forester recounts his experiences working with trees and the logging industry around the world.
In this blend of memoir and science, British author Fraser (Ghosts on the Somme, 2016, etc.) combines his personal experiences with broader economic, environmental, and policy questions to tell a story of forest management from the 1960s to the present. The author has worked with trees in Suriname, Nigeria, Thailand, and Indonesia, among other places, and offers travel stories in addition to details of the work assignments that brought him to the far-flung locales. His variety of professional experiences gives him the knowledge to critique forestry policies around the world as well as those of other related sectors, from poverty elimination to climate change strategy. The book presents a coherent, levelheaded take on sustainable forest management and on the role that forestry experts may play in policy discussions. To that end, Fraser offers examples from his own work and concrete recommendations for the future; for example, he notes that small logging enterprises and large multinationals may both succeed, but “intermediate scale” operations lose out in a globalized market. Although the narrative occasionally gets waylaid by overly complex sentences (“This first part of this story is more about Suriname than the sustainable management of tropical forests, but the reason for being in Suriname was to work out how to improve the management of their forests and that will come later”), it succeeds in engagingly presenting a unique perspective on global issues. Although the author is clearly well-versed in the details of forestry, he avoids jargon and provides clear explanations of key concepts, making the book accessible to nonspecialists. Fraser also does an excellent job of painting a vivid picture of the early decades of his career, when he tracked the paths of logging trucks without the aid of GPS and evaluated Soviet furniture manufacturing during the days of glasnost in the late 1980s.
An accessible combination of policy analysis and reminiscences from a half-century–long forestry career.Pub Date: May 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5246-2890-1
Page Count: 228
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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