Can we survive climate change? This learned book suggests that we can, but it won’t be easy.
A long look back at human interactions with changing climate issues in the past.
Archaeologists Fagan and Durrani, the former of whom has written about climate and natural resources in several popular books, survey the “story of how our ancestors adapted to…myriad shifts, large and small,” as portions of the world alternately heated and cooled. One adaptation of long standing is simply to move, as Ancestral Puebloan people did when a centurylong drought settled over what is now the Southwestern U.S. Ecological refugees who are leaving present-day drought-stricken zones in places such as the Sahel are evidence of “the ancient survival strategy of mobility on a truly massive scale.” The massive drought that has settled over the present-day Southwest does not afford the same ability. As exploding population in the region, the authors write, has “placed major stresses on groundwater and other scarce water supplies as global warming intensifies.” Given that mass migration “is no longer a viable option in our time,” it’s up to modern planners to figure out a way to ensure the chances of our survival. While questioning our near-religious faith in the thought that technology can somehow save us, the authors allow that it will help, even as we continue to wreak catastrophic damage. Megadroughts in places such as the Southwest and India are not our only concern; the authors write of climate change–induced flooding and plagues, noting that the difference between present and past is that the natural alterations of old are now human-caused. What we do have going for us, the authors conclude in this accessible survey, is our ability to think problems through. “In planning adaptations to future climate change,” they write, “we need to maximize those enduring qualities that will sustain us as we plan decisive adaptations for the future.” That includes local leadership to address local effects.
Can we survive climate change? This learned book suggests that we can, but it won’t be easy.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-5087-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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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