Fine environmental reporting from the Third World front lines. Mexico, notes Pacific News Service editor Simon, ``is the third most biologically diverse nation on the planet,'' the home of countless animal and plant species found nowhere else. Given current international concerns for biodiversity and habitat preservation, he argues that this vast biological cornucopia must be saved from further destruction; yet, in one case study after another, he shows that those international concerns have consistently been brushed aside by a succession of corrupt governments. Some of Mexico's problems are well known, notably that of air pollution in the major cities. Simon adds a personal note as a resident of the capital, where on windless days ``ten thousand tons of toxic gunk'' stall in midair to choke Mexico City's 20 million residents—gunk, Simon notes, that is made up not only of the normal car exhaust and other airborne industrial particulates, but also of blowing dirt from deforested hillsides, to say nothing of dried fecal dust stirred up from the city's innumerable outhouses. But many of Mexico's most pressing problems are less well known, and Simon performs a valuable service by cataloging them in close detail. Among them are the continuing destruction of farmland through overgrazing and improper agricultural practices; the depletion of supplies of potable water; and the devastation of old-growth forests (the Sierra Madre of Mexico is now, Simon writes, the scene of ``the highest rate of deforestation in the world''). Unless something is done to relieve the assault on Mexico's environment, Simon suggests, that nation's growing population will continue to seek routes of escape to safer, cleaner places—the US first among them. This sobering book is required reading for environmentalists, both critics and supporters of NAFTA, and all readers who care for Mexico's future.
Pub Date: April 22, 1997
ISBN: 0-87156-351-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
“Ideology is fairy tales for adults.” Thus writes economist and conservative maven Sowell in a best-of volume shot through with…ideology.
Though he resists easy categorization, the author has been associated with hard-libertarian organizations and think tanks such as the Hoover Institution for most of his long working life. Here he picks from his numerous writings, which have the consistency of an ideologue—e.g., affirmative action is bad, period. It’s up to parents, not society or the schools, to be sure that children are educated. Ethnic studies and the “mania for ‘diversity’ ” produce delusions. Colleges teach impressionable Americans to “despise American society.” Minimum-wage laws are a drag on the economy. And so on. Sowell is generally fair-minded, reasonable and logical, but his readers will likely already be converts to his cause, for which reason he does not need to examine all the angles of a problem. (If it is true that most gun violence is committed in households where domestic abuse has taken place, then why not take away the abusers’ guns as part of the legal sentencing?) Often his arguments are very smart, as when he examines the career of Booker T. Washington, who was adept in using white people’s money to advance his causes while harboring no illusions that his benefactors were saints. Sometimes, though, Sowell’s sentiments emerge as pabulum, as when he writes, in would-be apothegms: “Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can’t stop with just one”; “I can understand why some people like to drive slowly. What I cannot understand is why they get in the fast lane to do it.” The answer to the second question, following Sowell, might go thus: because they’re liberals and the state tells them to do it, just to get in the way of hard-working real Americans. A solid, representative collection by a writer and thinker whom one either agrees with or not—and there’s not much middle ground on which to stand.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-465-02250-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
SEEN & HEARD
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