An earnest antidote to the climate crisis blues.
The ongoing climate crisis has propelled author and speaker Ensign on a personal journey to uncover all the ways that disaster may yet be averted.
A sense of melancholy and heaviness pervades every step of the author’s yearlong exploration of three key questions: “What harmful human actions are causing our environmental crisis? How do we learn to work together to solve the challenges we face? What positive actions can we take to benefit our Earth home and all of Earth’s inhabitants?” She initially visited parks, farms, woodlands, and nature preserves all around the Midwest, hoping to find answers. Feeling discouraged and overwhelmed, the author wisely chose to kick off her main expedition at a cloistered hermitage nestled deep in a forest. Nature’s rhythm and flow provided her with the inspiration she needed for the task ahead. She later met a Lakota healer who called Ensign a “frightened fox” who needed to “release the fears from [her] past and look toward the future.” The author discovered that the answers she sought were in abundance. Some solutions draw on time-honored traditions of Indigenous people, she notes, regarding being good stewards of the land. Other remedies stem from technological advancements, including “solar trees” that can scrub the air of greenhouse gases. Some readers may find her encouragement to vote for environmentalist candidates to be naïve, and others may roll their eyes at the notion that humanity can assuage global warming by simply adjusting some personal buying habits and recycling more. At the same time, Ensign does acknowledge that “individual action alone will not solve our environmental challenges.” Much of her on-the-ground reportage heavily emphasizes what one can learn from nature. Despite her ambivalence and doubt about humankind’s ability to overcome the ongoing crisis, her decision to turn her one-year mission into a two-year endeavor underscores the abundance of options. Also, her acknowledgment that people need to “implement solutions that come from the people: not solutions for the people but from the people” provides further credibility to her findings, which ultimately make this book an uplifting journey.
An earnest antidote to the climate crisis blues.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780988332034
Page Count: 244
Publisher: SpiritHawk Life Publications
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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