by Daniel Mathews illustrated by Matt Strieby ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020
Thoughtful environmental reportage suggesting that the fate of trees is the fate of all life.
A walk in the woods with an environmental journalist and natural-history writer reveals that the forested world is in grave danger.
As Oregon-based naturalist Mathews (Natural History of the Pacific Northwest Mountains, 2017, etc.) writes, there are 113 species of pine tree, the most abundant and various of any conifer genus. All are in trouble to one extent or another because of climate change, from saplings to “living pine trees older than the Egyptian pyramids.” The author roams the world and the scientific literature to examine the many threats that pines face and their previous adaptations. The logic of the lodgepole, for instance, is impressive: Its cone carries a resin that melts at 113 degrees Fahrenheit, protecting the seeds inside the cone from fire. “The fire kills the pines but melts their cone-sealing resin,” he writes; “the cone scales open over several days or weeks, shedding seeds upon a wide-open seedbed.” Massive fires being an increasingly common phenomenon, particularly in the West, this adaptation is highly useful. On that note, Mathews observes, many forest scientists believe that there’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in the fire regime—i.e., the kinds of dense forests we cultivate demand huge fires. American logging trucks seem somehow incomplete without their loads of giant trees, after all, whereas European foresters favor smaller trees that wouldn’t make for ship masts or I-beams but that do just fine to make studs. In many places, the destruction of fire pales next to that of pine borer beetles, both a harbinger and an effect of climate change. It’s difficult to control both, though, as Mathews writes; the cost of protecting homes in forests by doing such things as burying power lines is often so high that people have little motivation apart from self-preservation to do that necessary work. And, asks the author, “if self-preservation isn’t a motivation, what would be?” His book sounds a timely warning to pay more heed to the health of the woodlands.
Thoughtful environmental reportage suggesting that the fate of trees is the fate of all life.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64009-135-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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 Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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