A reasonable argument directed at a lay audience, many of whom have already made up their minds.
A rational if somewhat unlikely strategy to reverse global warming using current technology and without self-denial.
According to Steven Pinker, who contributes the foreword, Goldstein (Emeritus, International Relations/American Univ.; Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide, 2011, etc.) and Qvist, a Swedish engineer and clean energy consultant, offer “climate change for grown-ups. Rather than starting from baby steps and hope these add up, it starts from where we need to end up and asks how we can get there.” The world’s energy mostly goes into electricity generation, transportation, and heating. The future requires electricity produced without burning fossil fuels. After the usual gloomy introduction—the fastest-growing source of carbon dioxide in the world remains coal—the authors point out that several countries (e.g., Sweden and France) are steadily reducing carbon dioxide production without inconveniencing their prosperous, nonabstemious citizenry. Writers in this genre often prefer solutions that require personal actions (recycling, smaller cars) that have little impact, a frugal lifestyle that most people oppose, or a miraculous revolution in energy storage that is essential to making solar or wind power practical 24 hours per day. The authors argue for nuclear power, and the facts are certainly on their side. Nuclear plants are safer. Aside from producing global warming, the soot, heavy metals, sulfur, and nitrous oxides poured into the air from fossil fuel plants kill thousands every day from cancer and lung disease. Rapid decarbonization of the atmosphere—the only action that will reverse global warming—requires nuclear power. Despite an avalanche of facts and statistics, the authors are taking a “pro” position on a debate they largely lost 30 years ago. Opposition to nuclear power exerts great political influence on most developed democratic nations, and some (Germany, Switzerland) have sworn to eliminate it.
A reasonable argument directed at a lay audience, many of whom have already made up their minds.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5417-2410-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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