by Dickson Despommier ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 12, 2010
A captivating argument that will intrigue general readers and give policymakers and investors much to ponder.
Despommier (Microbiology and Environmental Sciences/Columbia Univ.) details his optimistic vision of a sustainable future based on urban agriculture.
In the past decade, the author and his graduate students have developed the idea of vertical farming, which would move American agriculture from rural areas into high-tech greenhouses stacked up in specially constructed city buildings. This debut is the author’s first full discussion of the concept, which has been widely covered in major media but never implemented. Recounting the evolution of agriculture, Despommier argues that traditional farming has ruined our ecosystems and cannot possibly meet the needs of a global population expected to grow to nine billion by 2050. Horizontal farming requires 70 percent of available freshwater, uses 20 percent of fossil fuels yearly and produces runoff that is a major source of water pollution. By contrast, vertical farms would rely on soil-free technologies: hydroponics, which permits growing plants in a water-and-nutrient solution; and aeroponics, which grows plants in a nutrient-laden mist. Housed in transparent buildings to capture sunlight, the urban farms would operate year-round, immune to the weather, and produce dozens of varieties of pesticide-free fruits and vegetables. Lower floors would house chickens and fish subsisting on plant waste. Providing food for “60 percent of the population that will live in cities twenty years from now,” the high-rise farms would recycle their own water, use the host city’s remediated household wastewater to grow crops, reduce carbon emissions and permit reforestation of farmlands to restore ecosystems and sequester carbon. They would also create new jobs, for workers to build and maintain the vertical farms, and for displaced traditional farmers, who would be paid to return their lands to hardwood forests. How this will sit with agribusiness and other powerful vested interests remains to be seen, but Despommier writes that his quixotic-seeming idea is feasible and has already won enthusiastic attention from scientists and others. The only thing lacking, he writes, is the political will and the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to build a prototype.
A captivating argument that will intrigue general readers and give policymakers and investors much to ponder.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-61139-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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BOOK REVIEW
by Bari Weiss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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