A provocative, informed, and compelling brief for the protection of a beautiful, imperiled world.
Time for Canadians to get serious about decarbonization and protecting biodiversity, according to this luminous eco-manifesto.
Dale, a professor emerita at Royal Roads University, warns that urgent action is needed to avoid irremediable harms from global warming and species loss. She suggests that the Canadian government set wildly ambitious goals, including achieving carbon neutrality by 2030, ending all government support for fossil fuel production, and devoting half the country’s land to biodiversity protection. Individuals should do their part too, she continues, by planting lawns with indigenous plants, shopping at farmers markets, and cutting back on meat. Her ideas open out into a wider progressive vision of economic and social sustainability and equality: Society should aim for “degrowth” that steadily lightens consumption’s burden on the land; the wealth of the rich should be redistributed through high taxes; the government should guarantee everyone a basic income to cushion people against the economic disruptions of decarbonization and ensure material sufficiency for all. A major theme here is the need for better messaging to combat climate denialism and complacency and convince people to act, which she provides through a lucid, fact-filled tour of scholarship on everything from planetary limits to housing costs. Dale’s prose is limpid and down-to-earth, emphasizing practicalities while adding evocative grace notes that bring eco-consciousness to life. (“After a rainfall, take the time to move the live worm from the pavement to the grass. Add refuse to the first of the 4 Rs, recognizing the power of your consumption choices. Speak up when you see something unsustainable at your local neighbourhood store. Talk to the manager about more regenerative options, ask about more sustainable choices, and keep speaking up and out.”) The book is illustrated with color reproductions of painter Nancyanne Cowell’s landscapes, which feature still waters beneath fluttering birds and undulant mists, backgrounded by green forests or city sunsets; these images provide a haunting visual accompaniment to Dale’s reflections.
A provocative, informed, and compelling brief for the protection of a beautiful, imperiled world.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781038315953
Page Count: 120
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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