Valuable, even provocative reading for environmental activists and students of international development.
The struggle for control over water is “one of the great looming subjects of the twenty-first century.”
So suggests journalist Leslie (The Mark, 1995), who documents attempts to persuade water to behave like any other resource and submit to damming. In the early 1970s, Leslie writes, large dams rose at the rate of 1,000 a year, but far fewer are now going up, in part because the best places to locate dams have been used, in part because engineers know more about the destructive effects of dams, in part because local activists have been successful in thwarting efforts to build them. Leslie focuses on three individuals involved in one way or another in ongoing dam-building projects. One is an Indian activist who has long been battling the Indian government’s program to build a huge dam, one of the world’s largest, on the Narmada River; the dam, Sardar Sarovar, is “a block so massive that its construction would be noteworthy even if it weren’t bisecting a riverbed, holding back a seasonally torrential river,” and though China’s Three Gorges Dam has earned much more publicity, Sardar Sarovar is likely to be as life-altering for those who will be displaced by it. The second of Leslie’s subjects is a developmental anthropologist who has been tracking just those dislocating effects on the peoples of southern Africa, while the third is an Australian water-project manager whose vexing task has been to balance conflicting demands to convert the Murray River into an engine of economic growth and to keep the river healthy. Each subject, and each river, has much to say, but the more compelling parts of Leslie’s story are broader-reaching observations offered without much elaboration: for instance, that 70 percent of the dams built in recent years should not have gone up, and that once a dam has gone up it’s difficult to get it down, particularly if “its sediment is laced with pesticides, fertilizer, or tailings; release that stuff, and watch the river wither.”
Valuable, even provocative reading for environmental activists and students of international development.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-28172-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
An intriguing meditation on the nature of the universe and our attempts to understand it that should appeal to both...
Italian theoretical physicist Rovelli (General Relativity: The Most Beautiful of Theories, 2015, etc.) shares his thoughts on the broader scientific and philosophical implications of the great revolution that has taken place over the past century.
These seven lessons, which first appeared as articles in the Sunday supplement of the Italian newspaper Sole 24 Ore, are addressed to readers with little knowledge of physics. In less than 100 pages, the author, who teaches physics in both France and the United States, cogently covers the great accomplishments of the past and the open questions still baffling physicists today. In the first lesson, he focuses on Einstein's theory of general relativity. He describes Einstein's recognition that gravity "is not diffused through space [but] is that space itself" as "a stroke of pure genius." In the second lesson, Rovelli deals with the puzzling features of quantum physics that challenge our picture of reality. In the remaining sections, the author introduces the constant fluctuations of atoms, the granular nature of space, and more. "It is hardly surprising that there are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than have been dreamed of in our philosophy—or in our physics,” he writes. Rovelli also discusses the issues raised in loop quantum gravity, a theory that he co-developed. These issues lead to his extraordinary claim that the passage of time is not fundamental but rather derived from the granular nature of space. The author suggests that there have been two separate pathways throughout human history: mythology and the accumulation of knowledge through observation. He believes that scientists today share the same curiosity about nature exhibited by early man.
An intriguing meditation on the nature of the universe and our attempts to understand it that should appeal to both scientists and general readers.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-18441-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science...
Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself, 1999, etc.), a man who knows how to track down an explanation and make it confess, asks the hard questions of science—e.g., how did things get to be the way they are?—and, when possible, provides answers.
As he once went about making English intelligible, Bryson now attempts the same with the great moments of science, both the ideas themselves and their genesis, to resounding success. Piqued by his own ignorance on these matters, he’s egged on even more so by the people who’ve figured out—or think they’ve figured out—such things as what is in the center of the Earth. So he goes exploring, in the library and in company with scientists at work today, to get a grip on a range of topics from subatomic particles to cosmology. The aim is to deliver reports on these subjects in terms anyone can understand, and for the most part, it works. The most difficult is the nonintuitive material—time as part of space, say, or proteins inventing themselves spontaneously, without direction—and the quantum leaps unusual minds have made: as J.B.S. Haldane once put it, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” Mostly, though, Bryson renders clear the evolution of continental drift, atomic structure, singularity, the extinction of the dinosaur, and a mighty host of other subjects in self-contained chapters that can be taken at a bite, rather than read wholesale. He delivers the human-interest angle on the scientists, and he keeps the reader laughing and willing to forge ahead, even over their heads: the human body, for instance, harboring enough energy “to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.”
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science into perspective.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0817-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
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