A didactic work that will appeal most to those who already agree with the author’s assertions.
Quiñonez’s analysis of global crises focuses on education and community responses.
The author defines collapse as the current era of societal decline: “For thousands of years, various entities have been at play—narratives, groups, and forces—herding humanity towards this moment of reckoning.” This decline, he says, encompasses the world economy, mental health issues, addiction, climate change, and geopolitics, among other topics. Although the author suggests that “unavoidable catastrophe is assured,” we still have productive ways to respond to the “polycrisis,” he asserts. Part 1 situates readers in the current global troubles, aiming to help them recognize that they have cause for deep concern for the planet’s well-being. Part 2 delves deeply into future crises, including compelling scientific data on climate change. Most interestingly, as the author points, “Fossil fuel use hasn’t decreased despite an increase in renewable energy production.” The author uses the term hopium, which he frames as blind faith in technology to solve the world’s problems. Part 3 focuses on potential responses to the polycrisis, relying on wisdom from Native peoples and mutual aid. The most compelling aspect of this book is a chapter debunking common misconceptions about possible solutions: For example, in response to the notion that merely spending more on food production is an easy fix, Quiñonez counters, “Food production is not merely about money. It is impacted by geopolitics, supply chain disruptions, droughts, floods, storms, heat waves, frosts, wars, pests, energy availability, and fertilizer shortages, among other factors.” Still, the book as a whole remains overly abstract, despite its ambition. Parts 1 and 3 lack concrete data and anecdotes to properly situate readers in the author’s claims of a global crisis. Skeptics may also find it difficult to embrace the author’s point of view, as he’s not an expert on the issues at hand, although he notes that “I’ve lived in a specific context with a particular nature and nurture, allowing me to be receptive to these issues while maintaining a relatively clear outlook.”
A didactic work that will appeal most to those who already agree with the author’s assertions.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9781777283827
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Boreal Creek Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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