A disturbing, well-researched study with solid proposals to address a deep-seated problem.
Why our clothes could be slowly undermining our health.
As Wicker shows, fast-fashion garments often have a cocktail of dangerous chemicals embedded in the fabric, and there is no effective national regulation of them. The author, founder and editor-in-chief of EcoCult, first became aware of this issue when investigating health problems reported by airline employees, mainly rashes and eye irritations but sometimes much more serious concerns. The cause was traced back to new uniforms that, like most garments sold in the U.S., had been produced overseas. This led Wicker to look more broadly at the clothing industry, and she discovered that nearly everything contained harmful chemicals, ranging from fungicides to anti-wrinkle additives. Many dyes, especially those used to produce neon colors, are used in dangerous quantities, and toxins can be absorbed through the skin or even inhaled. Wicker supplies a useful glossary of chemicals and notes that one of the most common is formaldehyde, which is harmless in small doses but carcinogenic when used intensively. People with allergies are often the first affected, but there are links to broader health issues, and Wicker has a long list of horror stories. Even more, in the countries where the garments are produced, there are cases where entire communities have been poisoned by toxic fumes or contaminated water. Wicker points to some clothing companies that have started to detoxify their products, but others are seemingly willing to prioritize profits over customer health. She argues for stronger regulation to ensure transparency and a higher level of safety, with an expansion of the oversight of the Consumer Product Safety Commission to include clothing. At another level, consumers can help themselves by avoiding cheap knockoffs, buying natural fabrics, minimizing dry-cleaning, and staying away from garments that have been heavily dyed. Also, writes the author, trust your nose: If something smells bad, it probably is.
A disturbing, well-researched study with solid proposals to address a deep-seated problem.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422618
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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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