A compelling argument that companies are willing but not eager to fight climate change.
How five major U.S. corporations based in the South are dealing with climate change.
In his latest, environmental history professor Elmore, the author of Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism and Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future, makes an evenhanded, informative effort to view matters from the points of view of Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Walmart, FedEx, and Bank of America. Of course, such massive corporations focus on profit, but they have no objection to a nominal expense for beneficent projects. Currently, pressure is increasing to spend money fighting climate change. Elmore begins with a short history of each company and then describes their responses, with outcomes varying from modest to minimal. Few readers would expect Coca-Cola to lead these efforts, but its CEO was the only one to pledge to eliminate its major pollutant, hydrofluorocarbons, used in the world’s refrigeration systems, which are thousands of times worse than carbon dioxide in warming the planet. Although converting to other chemicals has proved unexpectedly difficult, Coca-Cola did not back away from its pledge, but the results have been unimpressive so far. Delta boasts that it reduces its carbon footprint by flying fuel-efficient aircraft, but Elmore shows how there is less there than meets the eye. Since fuel is an airline’s highest operating cost, efficiency is good business. Ironically, with declining petroleum prices in the 2010s, older gas guzzlers from the 1970s became so cheap that Delta began investing in them. Walmart, which sucks up land and small businesses, imports most merchandise from China, and pays workers poorly, proclaims its greenness but seems to be dragging its feet. Although not widely considered a polluter, Bank of America admits that its loans support urban sprawl, highways, fossil fuel production, and the destruction of wetlands and forests, and it intends to continue those practices.
A compelling argument that companies are willing but not eager to fight climate change.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781469673332
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A remarkably thorough and thoughtful case for the reconciliation between science and faith.
A duo of French mathematicians makes the scientific case for God in this nonfiction book.
Since its 2021 French-language publication in Paris, this work by Bolloré and Bonnassies has sold more than 400,000 copies. Now translated into English for the first time by West and Jones, the book offers a new introduction featuring endorsements from a range of scientists and religious leaders, including Nobel Prize-winning astronomers and Roman Catholic cardinals. This appeal to authority, both religious and scientific, distinguishes this volume from a genre of Christian apologetics that tends to reject, rather than embrace, scientific consensus. Central to the book’s argument is that contemporary scientific advancements have undone past emphases on materialist interpretations of the universe (and their parallel doubts of spirituality). According to the authors’ reasoned arguments, what now forms people’s present understanding of the universe—including quantum mechanics, relativity, and the Big Bang—puts “the question of the existence of a creator God back on the table,” given the underlying implications. Einstein’s theory of relativity, for instance, presupposes that if a cause exists behind the origin of the universe, then it must be atemporal, non-spatial, and immaterial. While the book’s contentions related to Christianity specifically, such as its belief in the “indisputable truths contained in the Bible,” may not be as convincing as its broader argument on how the idea of a creator God fits into contemporary scientific understanding, the volume nevertheless offers a refreshingly nuanced approach to the topic. From the work’s outset, the authors (academically trained in math and engineering) reject fundamentalist interpretations of creationism (such as claims that Earth is only 6,000 years old) as “fanciful beliefs” while challenging the philosophical underpinnings of a purely materialist understanding of the universe that may not fit into recent scientific paradigm shifts. Featuring over 500 pages and more than 600 research notes, this book strikes a balance between its academic foundations and an accessible writing style, complemented by dozens of photographs from various sources, diagrams, and charts.
A remarkably thorough and thoughtful case for the reconciliation between science and faith.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9789998782402
Page Count: 562
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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