A compelling call for change that would benefit from stronger sources.
The noted environmental activist reprises his proposals to save humanity.
For the past 30 years, McKibben (Environmental Studies/Middlebury Coll.; Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance, 2017, etc.), founder of the environmental activist organization 350.org, has been issuing urgent warnings about the consequences of climate change and the need to promote sustainable energy sources. In Enough (2003), he added to his concerns genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, which he sees as posing dire threats to humanity. Ticked off by “a dozen high profile books devoted to the idea that everything in the world is steadily improving”—notably Enlightenment Now (2018), in which Steve Pinker demonstrated his “trademark perkiness”—McKibben underscores his arguments and proposes cautiously hopeful solutions. He blames the fossil fuel industry, headed by greedy energy moguls such as the Koch brothers and Exxon executives, for impeding reforms that could stave off disaster. Offering ample evidence of the damage caused by climate change, the author feels certain that people around the world “are not just highly concerned about global warming, but also willing to pay a price to solve it” by seeing their energy bills rise, with the money spent on clean energy programs. He cites a study that concludes that “every major nation on earth could be supplying 80 percent of its power from renewables by 2030.” McKibben is less persuasive in his analyses of the threats of artificial intelligence and gene editing, mainly because he gleans his information from newspaper and popular magazine articles rather than peer-reviewed scientific studies that would give his assertions more weight. Against both technologies, he recommends nonviolent resistance. Although open to the idea that new jobs will emerge when robots replace people for much work—solar panels can be installed only by humans, for example—he would like us all to take it slowly. Similarly, we need to resist gene-editing technology. While now such techniques can repair or eliminate genetically caused disease, he sees, in a dystopian future, the creation of designer babies.
A compelling call for change that would benefit from stronger sources.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-17826-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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