A caustic but well-researched exploration of environmental crises and public policy.
Currie challenges mainstream solutions to the climate change crisis with his own approach.
In his everyday life choices, the author would seem to follow environmentalist ideals. For example, he doesn’t own a car or gas appliances, and hasn’t been on a plane in decades. Yet he refuses to join with activist groups, he says, because “B.S. is ubiquitous in the world of climate change.” His introductory chapters lay out the “vast empirical evidence” for anthropogenic global warming and the greenhouse effect. However, he goes on to say that the actions of climate protestors often “do more harm than good,” as do the optics of world leaders and celebrities flying “to Davos in their private jets to discuss global warming.” One of the worst offenders, he asserts, is the Democratic Party,whom the author convincingly argues has maintained close ties with fossil fuel companies, despite their rhetoric. Even the Green New Deal, Currie suggests, is rife with public-private ventures that amount to “little more than greenwashing” for corporations. A similar scheme to swindle taxpayers, he asserts, comes in the form of carbon offsets, which the author describes as a “get out of jail free card” for polluters. Anyone who criticizes these nominally “green” plans, laments Currie, is ostracized by the left, even though these policies, he says, “prioritize short term economic growth maximization over long term ecological stewardship.” The book’s acerbic writing style may not appeal to all readers; he also offers harsh critiques of figures on the right and left, including former president Donald Trump and climate activist Greta Thunberg. People and programs on the left, though, are the targets of many of the book’s criticisms—but this is only, the author says, because he considers conservative skeptics of climate change as “beyond reach.” The main strength of this book, however, lies in its in-depth exploration of public policy proposals; each chapter is backed up by a wealth of scholarly sources, which bolster the book’s mission to challenge readers to think about climate change policy “on a deeper, more real level.”
A caustic but well-researched exploration of environmental crises and public policy.Pub Date: July 6, 2023
ISBN: 979-8397901949
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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