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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A cosmic straw man is vanquished in the fight against dangerous ideals such as social justice and equality. This is not the place to look for original ideas or honest analysis. Presumably, Sowell’s (Migrations and Cultures, 1996, etc.) goal is to entertain those who share his convictions rather than convince open-minded readers, and this audience will be pleased. “Cosmic justice” is presented as a fundamental departure from the “traditional” conception of justice, which Sowell claims has the “characteristic of a process,” rather than of a particular outcome. He conveniently forgets to mention that this “tradition” dates back only to the emergence of liberal-democratic states and that contrasting notions of procedural vs. substantive justice remain the subject of lively debate. Admitting legitimate disagreement over even something as slippery as justice would soften the blows he aims at those who think inequality and any associated oppression raises concerns a just society should address, and Sowell is not one to temper a political argument simply to maintain intellectual integrity. He is not straightforwardly defending inequality, of course, but rather is pursuing the familiar strategy of attacking measures that could alleviate it. Sowell, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, boldly asserts that those who believe equality should be pursued through public policy “assume that politicizing inequality is free of costs and dangers.” No names are mentioned, and it is indeed hard to imagine that anyone would believe there are no costs or dangers. By stating the issue in terms of extremes, however, he ducks the real issue—the challenge of weighing costs and benefits—and avoids the need for incorporating any subtlety into his discussion. Confronted with such disingenuous blather, readers may find Sowell’s criticism of others applies well to Sowell himself: “To explain the levels of dogmatism and resistance to facts found in too many writings . . . it is necessary to explore what purposes are served by these visions.”
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-86462-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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