by Jeane Manning Joel Garbon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 10, 2011
The glass may be half full, but this book won’t necessarily convince readers to drink.
An exploration of alternative energy's future, looking beyond solar, wind and nuclear power.
Whether due to climate change, economic instability or threats to national security, many agree civilization can no longer depend on fossil fuels. So the question becomes “What next?” In the second edition of their book, Manning and Garbon—both active in the New Energy Movement, an organization devoted to developing and advancing clean, sustainable energy sources—believe there’s more than one answer to that question. The pair seeks to educate the public about an array of alternative technologies, virtually all of which were created and/or championed by inventors, scientists and laymen outside the scientific mainstream. In the book, the authors weave a narrative of individuals developing new approaches to energy only to be stymied by businesses, governments and a public unwilling to consider new paradigms. However, the authors’ passion and optimism is undermined by detours into New Age-style ideas—“orgone energy” and “sacred geometry” among them—and pervasive paranoia, as many of those profiled detail perceived coercion, intimidation and coordinated efforts to keep their discoveries unknown. These issues cause a more serious problem—few of the technologies have been subjected to organized scientific analysis, and many haven’t yielded reproducible effects. Since the overall thrust is that these technologies deserve research and recognition, the mostly anecdotal evidence referenced here isn’t convincing. While this shouldn’t deter readers from learning more—some of the technologies discussed have been reviewed favorably in mainstream publications, and the authors provide copious footnotes and resources for further research—the authors ultimately don’t advance their cause as they hoped. As Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof,” and the material presented here doesn’t meet that standard.
The glass may be half full, but this book won’t necessarily convince readers to drink.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0981054308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Amber Bridge
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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