by Gregory A. Ballard ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2019
An important, admonitory argument and appeal that will reward determined readers with open minds.
A forceful argument that we must wean ourselves off of oil and thereby save the environment and myriads of lives and deprive terrorist organizations of their greatest source of income.
Ballard, a former lieutenant colonel in the Marines and mayor of Indianapolis from 2008 to 2016, participated in the first Gulf War and saw firsthand the consequences of our deadly reliance on Middle Eastern oil. As he writes, we are spending billions of dollars annually to protect the oil infrastructure and flow—not counting the war expenses—and a large portion of the money goes to fund organizations and governments that wish us ill. The author devotes much of this brief volume to background information about how and why we have arrived at this state, and numerous pages of appendices add further information. He summarizes, for example, some critical events involving the Middle East, from the 1979 Iran hostage crisis to recent terrorist attacks in Western Europe. He briefly rehearses the history of the Middle East, from World War I to the present, and the geological and economic history of oil and its production, and he surveys the automotive alternatives to internal combustion engines. Regarding the latter, Ballard offers high praise for Elon Musk and his Tesla development. (He does not mention recent odd Musk-ian events.) The author then proposes ideas to accelerate our movement away from the internal combustion engine—e.g., more charging stations for electric cars. One mild oversight is that Ballard does not devote quite enough attention to the source of all the electricity required to realize his dream. Much more about this issue is needed to make his thesis more palatable to drivers of both massive SUVs and Teslas. The author supplements his sometimes-dense text with numerous photographs, graphs, and charts.
An important, admonitory argument and appeal that will reward determined readers with open minds.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-253-03744-2
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2019
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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