A well-rendered explanation of further bad news on the clean energy front.
An expert account of a poorly understood but critical element in our economy.
Most readers will agree with French journalist Pitron that China is this century’s rising power, but it may be news that it’s the world’s leading producer of 28 vital mineral resources. Some are well known and precious (platinum, palladium, germanium); others are “rare earth metals,” 17 obscure elements with names such as cerium, dysprosium, and yttrium. Taken together, their yearly production is 0.01% that of steel, but they possess dazzling magnetic properties, making them essential in computers, cellphones, rechargeable batteries, and catalytic converters. China produces 95% of rare earth metals. Western leaders have been expressing alarm at the dependence on China for strategic metals, but efforts to self-produce have accomplished little. Pitron delivers a gripping, detailed, and discouraging explanation. During most of the 20th century, American rare metal mines led the world but produced immense chemical and radioactive pollution. The mines were in constant trouble with the EPA. Then, in the 1990s, China offered to sell ore cheaply (actually at a loss). Because American entrepreneurs realized that Chinese labor was cheap and skilled and not subject to environmental regulation, over time, large numbers of high-tech firms moved operations across the Pacific. China once sold Apple the rare metals that make up the iPhone; today, it manufactures the device. China leads the world in renewable technology production—solar panels, wind turbines, electric-vehicle batteries, etc. This not only requires mining, which is not renewable, but leads to massive pollution. Furthermore, experts calculate that the mining, manufacturing, fueling, and operation of clean energy products generates more, not less, greenhouse gas. “Put simply,” writes the author, “clean energy is a dirty affair. Yet we feign ignorance because we refuse to take stock of the end-to-end production cycle of wind turbines and solar panels.”
A well-rendered explanation of further bad news on the clean energy front.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-950354-31-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribe
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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