An ingenious lesson in geopolitics.
A tour de force world history focused on water and how we use it.
Climate scientist Boccaletti, chief strategy office of the Nature Conservancy, begins with an emphatic denial that “water is an inert backdrop on the stage of human events.” To prove his thesis, he delivers an expert water-centered history of human progress from the time we became sedentary 10,000 years ago. “The story of water,” writes the author, “is not technological, but political.” Agriculture produces far more food than hunting and gathering but requires massive amounts of water. Depending on rain is unreliable, so centuries ago, farmers began to harness the power of wells, local rivers, canals, and irrigation projects, which preoccupied early governments as much as warfare. Ambitious cultures paid attention to transportation by water, which is 10 times more efficient than by land. In Boccaletti’s view, an essential feature of the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century was increased security of property, which produced an explosion of investment in water infrastructure. By the end of the 19th century, he writes, the “great American rivers…would become the basis for the rise of the American republic as the dominant economy of the twentieth,” the “hydraulic century.” Hydropower, not hydrocarbons, powered the electrification of America. Opening with the spectacular Panama Canal in 1904, the U.S. spent much of the 20th-century attempting to repeat the success of the Tennessee Valley Authority and Hoover Dam around the world, with spotty success. These efforts peaked during the 1970s, after which water-led development seemed to fall out of fashion—until, out of the blue, China appeared on the scene, built the Three Gorges Dam (“the largest single piece of infrastructure in the world”), and took the lead in spreading its technology around the world. “It may still be that if the twentieth was the American Century,” writes Boccaletti in this astute global study, “the twenty-first will be the Chinese one.”
An ingenious lesson in geopolitics.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4823-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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