A rare and winning combination of policy analysis and expose.
Czech, a conservation biologist, details the incompetence, dishonesty, and corruption he witnessed at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service during his employment there.
In 1999, when the author began working at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he did so with a surfeit of enthusiasm. He believed it was the “the most important conservation organization in the world” and that it set an example for the rest of the world to emulate. Czech wanted the agency to raise awareness about the “800-Pound Gorilla” (his sobriquet for economic growth), which he saw as the single greatest challenge to conservation. According to the author, unchecked economic growth is patently incompatible with ecological conservation, a position he articulates with impressive lucidity and power: “It’s a fact of ecological macroeconomics that the human economy grows at the competitive exclusion of non-human species in the aggregate. It’s a closely related fact of ecological macroeconomics that there is a conflict between economic growth and ecological integrity.” However, per the author, even though most of his superiors agreed, they not only thwarted his efforts but suppressed his speech, imposing onerous gag orders upon him followed by reprimands and suspensions. In Czech’s telling, a “bureaucratically inbred chain of command” (the author’s prose is a rollicking delight) made certain he was “harassed, hamstrung, and humiliated” until he finally resigned. The author not only documents what he considers to be the ineptitude of the agency at large but also explains, in accessible language, why breakneck economic growth is such a threat to the environment, and how a “steady state economy” could alleviate a considerable measure of the stress the natural environment suffers under. His rhetoric can be searingly strident, and he does not persuasively make a case that the “ecological integrity of the nation and planet is unravelling before our eyes.” However, his articulation of the tension between economic growth and ecological integrity is provocative, and his critique of his former employer is unsettling and edifying.
A rare and winning combination of policy analysis and expose.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781732993372
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Steady State Press
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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