An impressive combination of analytical meticulousness, intellectual scope, and philosophical restraint.
A comprehensive discussion of environmental sustainability as it applies to the materials used in manufacturing.
Goldstein and Foulkes-Arellano (the founders of JLFG Communications and Circuthon Consulting, respectively) astutely observe that, while natural processes tend to be circular (material inputs are typically matched by material outputs, leaving little waste), human commercial activity is largely linear: “A true circular economy is one where products and materials are kept within productive use for as long as possible, then looped (or circled) back into the manufacturing ecosystem.” Per the authors, our “disposable society” reflexively chooses low costs, innovation, efficiency, and economic growth over sustainability. They analyze the possibilities and challenges of achieving circularity from the perspective of material selection, assessing its significance both within the processes of extraction and manufacturing and from the more synoptic angle of overarching product design. As they see it, material selection is vital to the goal of circularity, and they provide an impressively thorough and intellectually exacting consideration of the materials in question, including metals, wood, glass, and plastic. The authors also discuss, with rigor and clarity, the profound challenge posed by the crucial need to reduce toxicity in materials and manufacturing, the threat posed by electronic waste, and the potential embedded within various commercial and political strategies available to us. This is an exceedingly practical work, packed with concrete illustrations of the authors’ principal points and interviews with industry insiders. The authors impressively balance prudent realism with informed optimism (“It is possible to celebrate advances while being realistic”). For example, they concede that disposable packaging isn’t going to vanish anytime soon, but note that doesn’t exclude the possibility of meaningful progress in the future. Although this is a reference volume—it is not meant to be read through all at once, but rather to be consulted as needed, like an encyclopedia—absorbing it in its entirety leaves one feeling well armed with empirical information and convincing arguments.
An impressive combination of analytical meticulousness, intellectual scope, and philosophical restraint.Pub Date: April 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781032529325
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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