If no clear thesis or mandate about waste emerges, the collection of amazing factoids makes for entertaining reading.
An overview of waste in its myriad forms.
Every year, the total amount of gas spilled at the pump equals that of the Exxon Valdez disaster. The asteroid 16 Psyche, between Jupiter and Saturn, contains a variety of metals valued at around $700 quintillion. Online orders are returned 30% of the time. “Sixty percent of the world is still without indoor toilets, while Americans spend half a billion dollars a year on Halloween costumes…for their pets.” Such intriguing facts are thick on the ground in this collaboration between Reese, a tech entrepreneur, and Hoffman, a literary agent. As the authors write, waste is undesirable, incurs a net negative cost, and can be avoided; that definition is roomy enough to encompass water, plastic, gold, food, electricity, money, time, and human potential. “No one wants to waste,” they write, and many work hard to avoid it, “but the world is full of well-meaning attempts to avoid waste that actually cause more waste than they prevent.” Most of the book is lively and humorous, though the chapters on wasting energy and natural resources are more scientific than the rest. "If the planet's carbon system is generally in balance without human activity, why don't the 40 gigatons humans emit each year stay in the atmosphere—or [be] reabsorbed, the way naturally produced CO2 is?" Though the authors suggest that "astute readers" may be wondering this, some may have checked out already. The final section, "The Philosophy of Waste," considers more abstract quantities, creating an abrupt transition in a book that could have used a little more smoothing around the edges. Still, the anecdotes are often amusing. For example, a hedge fund manager once paid Kenny Rogers $4 million to play "The Gambler" over and over at a party. He was later convicted of fraud, fined, and imprisoned. "Evidently,” write the authors, “he knew neither when to walk away nor when to run."
If no clear thesis or mandate about waste emerges, the collection of amazing factoids makes for entertaining reading.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13518-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Currency
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2021
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
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