A rare book on engineering and its economics that will satisfy general readers.
A welcome new entry in the how-stuff-works genre.
Everyone knows that roads and bridges are pieces of infrastructure, but so are light switches, sewers, telephone poles, and mailboxes; this imaginative book tells us how they work and what they mean. Writing about her childhood, Chachra, a professor at Olin College of Engineering, chronicles how her middle-class family in urban India received running water for one hour, twice per day, which they collected in buckets for bathing and flushing toilets and boiled for drinking. Electrical brownouts were routine. The author delivers a fine education on the technology that provides a seamless life for the lucky “global 10 percent.” All infrastructure requires energy. The automobile, which speeds us from place to place in a metal shell, requires enormous energy to manufacture and transport to the local dealership, but flipping a light switch makes us no less a human-machine hybrid. Infrastructure is “vast and collective,” but it makes us free. Chachra criticizes the idea of “off the grid,” a life that would be dominated by maintaining personal systems to deal with water, electricity, heat, cleaning, and producing and cooking food. The author devotes the second half of this superbly rendered book to the ongoing problems of her subject. A company can profit by building a pipeline or bridge; legislators boast of promoting it; the media celebrate its opening. Thereafter, like all infrastructure, it requires ongoing maintenance, which is boring and expensive and—all experts agree—wildly inadequate. Due to aging pipe systems, “15% of all clean drinking water in the U.S. is lost to leaks.” Every decade or so, when a bridge collapses, we mourn the victims, but little changes. Turning to “plan for abundant energy and finite materials,” Chachra is more optimistic than most, noting that “we are not doomed to a dystopian future of failing systems.”
A rare book on engineering and its economics that will satisfy general readers.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780593086599
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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