Insightful reflections from a thoughtful, energetic activist.
A young activist’s fresh take on climate change.
Readers reluctant to open another discouraging scientific explanation or call to action may perk up to discover that this is neither. In his first book, Sherrell, born in 1990, reveals that he has been obsessed with human-induced climate change for a decade. For the past five years, he has worked as an organizer at NY Renews, a statewide coalition aiming to reduce carbon emissions, mostly by lobbying New York’s government. A workaholic who spends his days on the phone, answering emails, attending meetings, and planning demonstrations, the author is deeply committed to fighting what he calls “the Problem”—and unlike many in his position, he understands that victories are few and less than complete. Here, the author unburdens himself, demonstrating the creativity that won him a Fulbright grant in creative nonfiction. Rather than delivering a polemic, autobiography, or confessional, Sherrell structures the narrative as a long letter to a hypothetical child that he hasn’t yet decided to bring into this fraught world. He is careful to note that “my aim here is not to wield you as a political cudgel.” Readers may approach the book as memoir since he recounts details of his background, education, social life, beliefs, and doubts, sometimes through conversations with friends, parents (sympathetic), therapists, and colleagues, sometimes through the words of poets, scientists, novelists, and the occasional guru. Although the author refuses to despair, he readily accepts the grim scientific evidence and that matters will get worse before they get better—if they ever do. Mostly, he addresses his unborn child, less to apologize for delivering it into a miserable future than to examine the value of his own life. As he writes, sagely, “a letter to you really just becomes a letter to me, replete with its own misfirings, its own blend of hurt and care.”
Insightful reflections from a thoughtful, energetic activist.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-14-313653-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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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