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 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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