A well-rendered but disheartening tale of a life’s work documenting the “human and animal detritus left behind in the...
A veteran journalist recalls his travels through the world’s dwindling wild places.
Linden (The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations, 2006, etc.) has spent 30 years chasing environmental stories for Time, National Geographic and the New York Times on the remote frontiers of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, where traditional cultures and modernity meet. “I never imagined that my visits to the ragged edge of the world were a farewell tour,” he writes. Amid tiny glimmers of hope, he chronicles the worldwide loss of ecosystems and cultures. Thousands of indigenous tribes manage to live on in the face of an onslaught by consumer society, but their cultures wither and die. In Polynesia, for instance, modernity has wiped out ways of life that tied Polynesians to the sea and one another. In many societies, indigenous shamans can no longer compete with the technological magic of the consumer society. Perhaps saddest of all, writes Linden, tribes that decide they do not enjoy living in the market economy cannot return to their former life in the wildlands because the forests, animals and rituals that sustained them have disappeared. Each chapter focuses on a specific place, including New Guinea, where modernity arrived after World War II; war- and epidemic-ridden sub-Saharan Africa; and Antarctica, where global warming is unfreezing time and harming creatures. The author notes that modern tourists begin appreciating some cultures just before they disappear—e.g., the continuing flocking of New Age seekers to Machu Picchu, which supposedly sits atop a giant crystal. One day, writes Linden, humankind may wake up to the disastrous consequences of capitalism’s “skewered incentives” to reap short-term profits. In the meantime, some form of traditional culture endures in distant places where tribes hang on and the local ecology retains continuity with the past.
A well-rendered but disheartening tale of a life’s work documenting the “human and animal detritus left behind in the aftermath of the advancing armies of the consumer society.”Pub Date: March 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02251-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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