Important, high-quality popular science.
An expert account of the immense international research effort to develop practical nuclear fusion.
Physicist and science writer Turrell reminds readers that burning fossil fuels provides 86% of the world’s energy. Scientists warn that we must massively reduce this number in order to avoid climate catastrophe, but it’s still growing. The author and the researchers he has consulted have a low opinion of renewables such as solar, wind, and hydropower. They feel that atomic power is a good method despite its problems, including public relations problems and issues related to scale. One possible solution is controlled nuclear fusion. Fusion produces 10 million times the energy of coal. Turrell explains that the process of two hydrogen atoms slamming together to form a helium atom releases immense energy but also requires titanic pressure and heat. Scientists can achieve fusion in the lab, but this requires expending energy. It happens deep within the sun, so current research projects require confining hydrogen under immense pressure and at millions of degrees of temperature. Since no container could survive contact with such material, this must take place in midair. Traveling the world, Turrell describes wildly complex efforts to achieve this with combinations of magnetism, inertia, pressure, and lasers. These efforts sometimes work, but only for short periods. No project has yet produced more energy than it consumes, but scientists are optimistic. One famous quip notes, “Fusion is the energy of the future…and always will be.” A diligent journalist, Turrell does not overhype his subject, delivering a painless education with asides on the history of the universe, the life cycle of stars, and the dismal consequences if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels. According to the author and countless scientists, this can only happen if nuclear fusion succeeds. “The ingredients of even the most basic form of fusion…could last us around 33 million years,” he writes.
Important, high-quality popular science.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982130-66-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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