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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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