An urgent, passionate defense of ecological conservation and understanding.
An examination of the devastating ecological, political and geographic consequences of climate change in the Arctic.
Struzik (The Big Thaw: Travels in the Melting North, 2009) has spent nearly 30 years writing about the Arctic, one of the world’s most sensitive and vital ecosystems, and he has no doubts that this fragile environment is undergoing unprecedented change. Recounting his years in the Arctic wild, he has enormous respect and reverence for the area’s delicate beauty. Through a mixture of personal observations and the latest academic and governmental reports on the region, Struzik concludes that while the Arctic has known periods of unusual warming in its history, recent changes are more rapid and severe than at any time before. The author provides no shortage of documentation to show that man’s encroachment in the area has been the deciding factor. For instance, oil-sands extraction has been an economic boom to the Arctic in recent years, but it has also brought human development and toxic runoff that contaminates nearby water sources. Locals and indigenous groups have noticed the direct changes wrought by oil and gas exploration and other projects like damming, as well as drastic shifts in ecological habits within the last 20 years—e.g., huge storm surges, massive wildfires and summer cyclones. Struzik is clever to point out that this rapid development in the Arctic is in part because the area was considered useless for most of history, except for a northwest passage. Nowadays, shipping routes through the Arctic are possible thanks to decreased amounts of sea ice and greater melt periods, which has also caused strange new migratory patterns in marine life. With perhaps the exception of Norway, governments consistently underfund research budgets in favor of allocating funds for industrial development and military installations, while the Arctic’s distress signals go unheeded. As Struzik notes, the changes in the Arctic will continue to surprise.
An urgent, passionate defense of ecological conservation and understanding.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1610914406
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Island Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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