Readers of this overheated but often on-the-mark polemic will conclude that the safest tactic is organic food and a fly...
“We spend our lives living in a chemical soup,” writes Vallianatos (This Land Is Their Land: How Corporate Farms Threaten the World, 2006, etc.), who was a risk evaluator for the Environment Protection Agency from 1979 to 2004. With Jenkins (Journalism/Univ. of Delaware; What’s Gotten Into Us: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World, 2011), he excoriates the agency for routinely yielding to outside pressure in regulating pesticides and other environmental pollutants.
Founded in 1970, the EPA inherited Department of Agriculture personnel who brought their enthusiasm for chemical farming. Dedicated scientists arrived, but their findings are never the last word. That belongs to their superiors, who weigh evidence of an agent’s toxicity against industry spokesmen and fierce opposition of administration and Congress to “burdensome government regulation” and “attacks on the farmer.” The authors recite a depressing litany of poisons approved despite damning, inadequate or fraudulent testing—and often no testing at all. EPA whistle-blowers, always portrayed as heroes, are usually ignored, demoted or fired. Although President Ronald Reagan’s effort to abolish the EPA failed, he weakened it dramatically. Abolition remains the goal of many Republicans, while Democrats oppose this plan. However, Democratic presidents, Barack Obama included, have proven a disappointment. Sadly, a minority of environmentalists excepted, Americans rarely pester their representatives about this subject or contribute to their campaigns. Agribusinesses and chemical manufacturers do both. Even an impartial EPA official—rare in this damning indictment—hears mostly one side of an argument. In the obligatory how-to-fix-it conclusion, Vallianatos and Jenkins suggest that the EPA should be run like the Food and Drug Administration and Federal Reserve—by experts, not political appointees. This is not likely.
Readers of this overheated but often on-the-mark polemic will conclude that the safest tactic is organic food and a fly swatter.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-914-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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