by Chip Ward ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 25, 1999
An eco-activist’s angry wake-up call about the harm being done to the environment by polluters, both military and industrial, and the need for citizens to seize power over the technological bullies in their neighborhood. Ward, who moved to Grantsville, Utah, believing it to be a fine small town to raise a family, soon discovered some unpleasant truths about his new home. Grantsville is located on the rim of the Great Basin, a vast desert of some 165,000 square miles that is the site of various military installations, including the Tooele Army Depot. There, Ward learned, old munitions were exploded in open pits. Also nearby, the Magcorp magnesium refinery, characterized by Ward as “the dirtiest industrial operation in America,— was releasing huge amounts of chlorine gas into the air. Ward traces a pattern of abusive military activity marked by denial and coverup, and charges that a tradition of trading environmental quality for jobs and revenue has turned wilderness areas into “environmental sacrifice zones.” Now dedicated to the struggle for a clean environment, he describes the many battles in the long fight to keep the army from incinerating nerve agents and to force Magcorp to clean up its refinery, and he concludes that local citizen activists are the key to success. Surveying the continuing battle over paying to store nuclear waste in the Skull Valley Reservation, he shows the division between Indians who view it as a bonanza and those who view it as a disaster while making his own stand on the question clear. He and his Grantsville neighbors, he asserts, are like the canaries used by old-time coal miners to warn of lethal gases. This time, however, once toxins are in the air, water, and food chain, everyone, not just those immediately downwind or downstream, is at risk. Except for an excess of confusing acronyms and abbreviations, a highly readable addition to the growing body of writing on the toxicity of our environment.
Pub Date: Nov. 25, 1999
ISBN: 1-85984-750-1
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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