by Christian D. Klose ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 30, 2014
A cautionary call to action that asserts that energy-hogging societies are triggering devastating earthquakes around the globe.
In 2008, between 5,000 and 10,000 children were killed when their classrooms collapsed during the Wenchuan quake in China. A scandal ensued regarding the structural integrity of the buildings, but Klose links the entire devastating event to the filling of the nearby Zipingpu reservoir two and a half years earlier. The author argues that at least some earthquakes are far from being “acts of God”; instead, they’re triggered by human enterprises such as mining, water storage, oil and gas drilling, and underground hazardous wastewater disposal. Despite the book’s title, fracking—a mining technique that uses high-pressure liquid to force natural gas and petroleum out of the ground—constitutes only a minor portion of the author’s investigations. Instead, he gives much more attention to the nature of earthquakes themselves: where the major fault lines lie, how huge amounts of trapped energy build up over time and the difficulties in predicting when the next “big one” might occur. “Regardless of whether earthquakes are natural or human caused, their prediction is a major problem,” he writes, “and prediction on a scale of a few days is nearly impossible without extraordinary information.” He claims that the number of earthquakes with death tolls of more than 100,000 people will more than double in this century, while the number of earthquakes killing 50,000 or more will triple. The author also sees soaring population growth as a contributing factor in the carnage—not only by providing clusters of potential victims, but also by creating a greater need to secure large amounts of cheap energy. That never-ending campaign, according to the author, is destabilizing the Earth’s crust in myriad ways—and fracking is only part of the problem. Klose’s case for human culpability is both accessible and scientifically based. However, the book’s title seems to be an unnecessary attempt to capitalize on the incendiary nature of the fracking debate. The author’s broader arguments, as plainly presented here, are enough to change the way readers think about earthquakes.
A provocative argument about why earthquakes shouldn’t be strictly considered natural disasters.
Pub Date: July 30, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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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