A dour assessment of the current state of green technology.
A critical look at the modern environmental movement and the promises of green, renewable technology.
All technologies come laden with costs that are never factored in, including damage to the environment in producing the workings of machines and commodities. “No technology is neutral,” write the authors. From that inarguable first tenet, they go on the attack. Even so-called environmentalists, they argue, are human-centered, and building things such as solar energy cells and wind towers are ineffective stopgaps meant to maintain wealthy lifestyles with minimum inconvenience. The real object of saving the world should be…saving the world—the spotted owls, the fish, the “last scrap of forest,” etc. As long as the emphasis is on humankind and trying to salvage what remains of civilization, the environmental movement will be thwarted in its stated task of healing the planet of the wounds industrial civilization has inflicted. Many of the authors’ points are cogent and well taken: Renewable energy sources have yet to do much to power the world, and producing solar cells and wind towers requires numerous rare metals—lithium, cerium, neodymium, yttrium, and the like—that are environmentally destructive to secure and do not easily lend themselves to recycling. The authors dismiss the longing of futurists and engineers for “technologies that haven’t been invented yet”—though by other accounts, there is hope that such things as capturing the energy from tidal flows and deep-sea thermal vents may bear sustainable fruit. Unfortunately, the hectoring tone will likely repel more readers than draw them in. The authors are knowledgeable on many of the most significant issues we face, and there’s useful information here, especially for diligent activists. However, the authors’ tendency to yell at the choir and curtly dismiss any arguments advanced by “mainstream environmentalism” may dampen the appeal to general readers.
A dour assessment of the current state of green technology.Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-948626-39-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Monkfish
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
A moving essay that should find its way into the hands of all students and teachers to provoke new conversation and...
An enchanting plea by the award-winning Nigerian novelist to channel anger about gender inequality into positive change.
Employing personal experience in her examination of “the specific and particular problem of gender,” National Book Critics Circle winner Adichie (Americanah, 2013, etc.) gently and effectively brings the argument about whether feminism is still relevant to an accessible level for all readers. An edited version of a 2012 TEDxEuston talk she delivered, this brief essay moves from the personal to the general. The author discusses how she was treated as a second-class citizen back home in Nigeria (walking into a hotel and being taken for a sex worker; shut out of even family meetings, in which only the male members participate) and suggests new ways of socialization for both girls and boys (e.g., teaching both to cook). Adichie assumes most of her readers are like her “brilliant, progressive” friend Louis, who insists that women were discriminated against in the past but that “[e]verything is fine now for women.” Yet when actively confronted by an instance of gender bias—the parking attendant thanked Louis for the tip, although Adichie had been the one to give it—Louis had to recognize that men still don’t recognize a woman’s full equality in society. The example from her childhood at school in Nigeria is perhaps the most poignant, demonstrating how insidious and entrenched gender bias is and how damaging it is to the tender psyches of young people: The primary teacher enforced an arbitrary rule (“she assumed it was obvious”) that the class monitor had to be a boy, even though the then-9-year-old author had earned the privilege by winning the highest grade in the class. Adichie makes her arguments quietly but skillfully.
A moving essay that should find its way into the hands of all students and teachers to provoke new conversation and awareness.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-91176-1
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
A lyrical, provocative take on pop music’s power.
A tale of a brief encounter and long obsession with the late musical icon Prince.
Prince (1958-2016) contained multitudes, and every book about him seems to explore his aura through a different filter—musical, sexual, sartorial, religious, and so on. In this slim book, first published as an essay under a different title in Harper’s in 2012, Pulitzer Prize–winning cultural critic Als emphasizes Prince’s role as a queer Black icon, somebody who challenged the notion that “for sex to be sex it needs to be shaming.” Prince’s 1988 album Lovesexy wasn’t his most successful, but for Als, it represents the high point of Prince’s sexual fluidity, his "DJ-like mixing of homosexualist and heterosexualist impulses.” The author reads Prince’s defiance toward the mainstream record industry in the 1990s as symbolic of his effort to challenge the supremacy of heteronormative, White behavior. But Prince is still a slippery persona for Als: He writes about interviewing him backstage before a 2004 concert and being simultaneously charmed by him (his face “had the exact shape, and large eyes, of a beautiful turtle”) and put off, as when he evangelized on his faith as a Jehovah’s Witness. Prince at once lamented male journalists who feared their femininity while projecting a "new, heterosexualized, Jesus-loving self.” At fewer than 50 pages, this book is too short to address Prince’s protean nature in depth. But as an appreciation of the liberating power he had over Als as a gay Black man, it’s undeniably engrossing. (Straight men felt that power, too: The book opens with a Jamie Foxx stand-up routine about having his hetero identity rocked by Prince.) In that regard, it’s a story about love in general, delighting in seeing yourself in a star, and lamenting when that star flickers in a different way.
A lyrical, provocative take on pop music’s power.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8112-3449-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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