by Justine Burt ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 9, 2019
An optimistic and detailed blueprint for a sustainable 21st-century world.
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A comprehensive vision of a more sustainable working world.
Corporate-sustainability consultant Burt’s well-designed, smoothly readable nonfiction debut centers on what she asserts are systematic, fundamental changes that human societies must make in the near future in order to survive. The author looks at traditional ways of generating energy, transporting people and materials, growing and distributing food, and relating to nature, and she determines, as many others have, that present patterns aren’t sustainable, even as they appear to be “locked on autopilot.” Burt’s book lays out meticulously comprehensive proposals for changing them, aimed primarily at two kinds of readers: policymakers in a position to “facilitate meaningful job creation” and everyday people who are willing to do the meaningful work of instituting planned changes and keeping them going. “Do we want future generations to look back at our time as the Great Unraveling,” she asks, “or should we instead choose a more sustainable path so that our grandchildren see this era as the Great Turning?” The related “Great Pivot,” as the author lays it out, puts this philosophy into practice. If the pressing, urgent goal is to reduce carbon emissions and waste in all sectors of daily life, the creation of large numbers of new jobs in many areas will be necessary; Burt enthusiastically elaborates on these areas, including building and enhancing bicycle-related infrastructure, designing walkable communities, deconstructing energy-inefficient buildings for salvage, massively increasing recycling, restoring healthy forests, and creating more small, organic farms. The author’s narrative is buoyantly can-do and forward-thinking, with a refreshing real-world pragmatism that shows how previous, small-scale sustainability projects have been put into practice. Much of what the author proposes will be done against the backdrop of what she calls the “new American Dream,” which will no longer be characterized by relentlessly increasing consumption (“stability, not upward mobility”); those who’ve been left behind by the traditional American dream, she asserts, would find newly created, more meaningful jobs in the transition from a “take-make-waste linear economy to a circular economy.” Overall, this book will likely inspire a great many readers hoping for a better future.
An optimistic and detailed blueprint for a sustainable 21st-century world.Pub Date: March 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-935994-34-3
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Bivens & Jensen Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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