Scholarly rather than polemical and of interest to students of environmental and economic history.
Wide-ranging survey of the environmental damage wrought by industrial pollution in the last few centuries.
University of Burgundy historian Jarrige and scientific researcher Le Roux write of pollutions in the plural, for there are many channels that bring toxic materials within reach. “Never have so many chemical products—the safety of which generate widespread uncertainty—been in circulation,” they write in a narrative full of tables and hard data, adding, “chemical contamination is a feature of the entire planet.” These multiple pollutants combine and evolve along “complex pathways” that have developed over the roughly three centuries since industrialization emerged and then became economically dominant. The authors add that of course pollutions have been with us before that economic formation took shape, though in the main the concept of pollution (in the singular) was “rooted in religious cosmology and its ideas about purity and impurity”; some of those ideas associated such impurity with nonbelievers, outsiders, and the poor. With the rise of industrialization, those ideas gave way to the association of pollution as an inevitable collateral cost of progress. Still, as the authors note of the global market for recycled and castoff materials, “the waste trade is just one of the many examples that show that the burden of pollution is mainly borne by the poorest people in the poorest countries on the planet.” Meanwhile, citizens of wealthy countries are awash in goods and technologies. Laws have been written in poor and wealthy countries alike to curb pollution and polluters, the authors note, often to little avail, since, “as in the past, the most polluting industries do not cease to create new methods to resist, obfuscate, or soften environmental standards or reduce opposition.” So it is that pollutions are seen through the lens of capitalist economics as mere externalities rather than a shrouded and present danger.
Scholarly rather than polemical and of interest to students of environmental and economic history.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-262-04383-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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