A fascinating history of humankind as a consumer of energy.
An essential feature of our lives receives an ingenious analysis.
All living organisms expend energy (i.e., work), but humans have transformed this with spectacular creativity that began with stone tools and led to cities, nations, and networks of energy-hungry machines. Anthropologists specialize in describing this process, and Suzman delivers a delightful account of their findings without ignoring the occasions when colleagues missed the boat. For more than 1 million years, our ancestors’ major tool was a crude, difficult-to-manipulate chipped-rock hand ax. Gathering food undoubtedly required its use, but that was also a laborious process. Gorillas eat 15% of their body weight per day and spend half their waking hours foraging; human today eat 2% to 3% thanks to fire, man’s greatest labor-saving invention. Cooking vastly concentrates food energy, so evolution shrank our jaws, teeth, and guts and grew our brains. Experts once taught that hunter-gatherers led exhausting lives on the edge of starvation. Then studies revealed that they didn’t work hard and ate better than cultures that followed. Once agriculture developed, work became grueling but produced quantities of poorer quality food that supported cities, cultures, governments, and innumerable trades. Animals provided almost all human nonfood energy until the 18th century, when the Industrial Revolution produced an explosion of power for industry and transportation. In the early 19th century, electricity transformed domestic life. The 20th-century computer revolution assumed much of human brain work, and 21st-century artificial intelligence has upset many observers who conclude “that not only were robots already queuing at the factory gates but that they had fixed their beady little robot-eyes on nearly half of all existing jobs.” Ironically, as Suzman demonstrates near the end of this educative and entertaining book, this energy bonanza has not led to the life of leisure that futurists predicted. In the U.S., working hours have actually increased, and technology’s profits mostly enrich a small minority who already enjoy a high income.
A fascinating history of humankind as a consumer of energy.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-56175-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
A harrowing memoir of grief and love.
An indelible portrait of a mother’s courage.
Award-winning novelist McCann and Foley, mother of murdered journalist James Wright Foley (1973-2014), offer a powerful recounting of the unspeakable tragedy and its aftermath. In August 2014, after being held hostage for two years, Jim was beheaded by Islamic Group terrorists. He had been taken hostage once before, in Libya, but that time was released after 44 days. Undaunted, he went to Syria “determined to bear witness to the horrific bombings and gassings of innocent civilians by the Assad regime.” After he was taken hostage, the Foley family, to their deepening dismay, discovered that the U.S. refused unequivocally to negotiate for hostages’ release, and the Foleys were threatened with prosecution if they tried to raise ransom money on their own. Meanwhile, though, through “an incredibly circuitous route,” several European governments managed to free their own hostages. “They insinuated themselves carefully into the communications system,” the authors write, “got under the umbrella of the emails, and forged their own secret methods that included a network of agents and ambassadors and, yes, even spies.” Foley vents her anger toward the many government officials who claimed they were powerless to help. “The plain fact of the matter is that we don’t care as much for our aid workers or our volunteer ambulance drivers or our journalists as we do for our military,” the authors assert. Foley and her family founded the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation to advocate for the freedom of those taken hostage or detained abroad, and she takes hope from recent legislation, most recently by Biden’s executive order, in support of hostages. Hoping for “answers to help her in the wider work against hostage-taking,” Foley met with one of the terrorists involved in her son’s murder—unsettling encounters that bracket the striking narrative.
A harrowing memoir of grief and love.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9798985882452
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Etruscan Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
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