Wilson occasionally overreaches but nonetheless provides ingenious food for thought.
An unsettling exploration of the history and cultural influence of air conditioning and refrigerants.
In his first book, journalist and educator Wilson shows us how “studying cooling can help us understand global heating,” offering an important reminder about the problems associated with refrigerant chemicals. “We’ve launched nearly ungraspable amounts of refrigerant into the stratosphere without thinking,” he writes, “and still, we hardly notice them.” Hailed as a miracle when it was introduced to the public in 1930, Freon quickly became the world’s leading refrigerant because, unlike its predecessors, it was nontoxic and nonflammable. But chemists discovered that Freon destroys the stratospheric ozone layer. In a move still hailed as the single most successful international agreement, the 1987 Montreal Protocol required nations to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. Refrigerants are now chemically related to Freon but much less harmful to ozone. So what’s the problem? It turns out that the entire Freon family consists of potent greenhouse gases—thousands of times more so than the carbon dioxide created from burning fossil fuels. Having absorbed this shocking information early on, readers may expect Wilson to sound the alarm and urge climate activists to pay attention. Although that’s an ongoing theme, the author has not written a polemic but rather a philosophical attack on the free market and capitalism, which drive our obsession with personal comfort. According to Wilson, this began in 19th-century America with industrial cooling, invented for factory owners who had no interest in workers but needed to “condition” air to benefit machines and products. After World War II, technical progress and the use of Freon produced home and auto air conditioners. Postwar housing, featuring picture windows, concrete floors, and low ceilings, “required air-conditioning,” and public spaces emptied as people sealed themselves inside. Wilson maintains that this love of personal comfort, regardless of community and environmental costs, is a mark of “escalating imperialism, spreading capitalism, the accelerating exploitation of workers, [and] the continuation of racist and classist ideas about the value of certain bodies over others.”
Wilson occasionally overreaches but nonetheless provides ingenious food for thought.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982111-29-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.
Portraits in a post-pandemic world.
After the Covid-19 lockdowns left New York City’s streets empty, many claimed that the city was “gone forever.” It was those words that inspired Stanton, whose previous collections include Humans of New York (2013), Humans of New York: Stories (2015), and Humans (2020), to return to the well once more for a new love letter to the city’s humanity and diversity. Beautifully laid out in hardcover with crisp, bright images, each portrait of a New Yorker is accompanied by sparse but potent quotes from Stanton’s interviews with his subjects. Early in the book, the author sequences three portraits—a couple laughing, then looking serious, then the woman with tears in her eyes—as they recount the arc of their relationship, transforming each emotional beat of their story into an affecting visual narrative. In another, an unhoused man sits on the street, his husky eating out of his hand. The caption: “I’m a late bloomer.” Though the pandemic isn’t mentioned often, Stanton focuses much of the book on optimistic stories of the post-pandemic era. Among the most notable profiles is Myles Smutney, founder of the Free Store Project, whose story of reclaiming boarded‑up buildings during the lockdowns speaks to the city’s resilience. In reusing the same formula from his previous books, the author confirms his thesis: New York isn’t going anywhere. As he writes in his lyrical prologue, “Just as one might dive among coral reefs to marvel at nature, one can come to New York City to marvel at humanity.” The book’s optimism paints New York as a city where diverse lives converge in moments of beauty, joy, and collective hope.
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781250277589
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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
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