Martin concludes that things may just work out. Fans of H.G. Wells will enjoy the argument, which is definitely not for...
There’s good news and bad news: We’re destroying the planet, and some of us are going to succeed.
There’s more than a little Buckminster Fullerish optimism—and off-kilter ideas—in Martin’s take on the state of the world, though the reader has to work through some very grim statistics indeed. For one, it takes 1,000 tons of water to make the ton of grain necessary to produce 18 pounds of beef—and around the planet, we’re using 160 billion tons more water each year than is replenished by rainfall. For another, “one-third of the world’s forest areas has disappeared since 1950, and the destruction is accelerating.” To top it off, China and India are becoming well-to-do enough to want a car in every garage, which will exacerbate the fuel crisis. Enter technology, soft (solar panels) and hard (genetic retooling) alike, to the rescue. Martin, a former IBM engineer who lives part-time on a waterless island off Bermuda, marvels that America does not harvest rainwater, though it is easy to do so; he urges that China and other nations move to nuclear power rather than burn more coal, which “would have a devastating effect on the world’s climate”; and the like. Moreover, he opens a window onto some weird-science possibilities, including “electronic brain appendages” that may help us think our way through to a solution of trifles like global warming and mass extinction. In the face of doom, Martin has a positive outlook that sometimes verges on Pollyanna territory, as when he predicts that by 2050, “most of the world will be familiar with its diverse cultures,” so much so that we’ll stop shooting at each other. That, and the prospect that medicine will make Methuselahs of today’s youngsters, may mean yet more people on this busy planet.
Martin concludes that things may just work out. Fans of H.G. Wells will enjoy the argument, which is definitely not for Luddites.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2006
ISBN: 1-57322-323-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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