A relentlessly upbeat but necessary story of an important environmental organization.
The 40-year history of the National Resources Defense Council.
In this wholly positive view of NRDC, the authors write from the perspective of John Adams, the co-founder and longtime president. Though to some extent a personal memoir, the book is primarily an institutional history filled with insider details. The organization began as a group of lawyers suing to enforce environmental laws, so effectively that they nicknamed themselves “the shadow EPA.” With time their approach broadened, primarily because of political leaders hostile to environmentalism, who come in for criticism here. The authors repeatedly emphasize the successes that came from negotiating with adversaries, building a membership to provide public pressure and showing companies how environmentally friendly practices can be in their financial interest. Similarly, the issues of concern to NRDC expanded beyond the original focus on “clean water, clean air, a sustainable environment, and the preservation of America’s unique wilderness.” For example, they were instrumental in setting up nuclear-test monitoring stations in the United States and Soviet Union with an eye to promoting disarmament. Despite covering many campaigns and introducing an enormous number of people, the narrative is never dry or repetitive. Today, the authors insist that what “NRDC and the environmental movement ultimately will be remembered for is what we did to deal with the climate crisis.” Some environmentalists have called the authors too optimistic about the eventual resolution of the issue and criticized their willingness to endorse imperfect regulations. In response, they argue that it is more important to get started than to insist on perfection and, with NRDC’s long string of victories behind it, they express confidence of eventual success. The book begins with a foreword by Robert Redford, one of the many celebrities mentioned as major NRDC supporters.
A relentlessly upbeat but necessary story of an important environmental organization.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8118-6535-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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