An important work of environmental and legal reportage on a contest that will likely continue for years.
Searching account of Native resistance to the oil pipeline that has steadily invaded their homelands.
Dakota Access, a company specializing in transporting oil from the vast Bakken fields of North Dakota and points beyond, had long had its way in securing easements for its pipeline across multiple states. Then, writes human rights lawyer Todrys, they ran into the Standing Rock Sioux, “who would not be bought off.” Indeed, the leadership of Standing Rock had allowed an escrow account meant to compensate the tribe for the loss of the Black Hills to reach $2 billion and go untouched: “The Sioux don’t want the money; they want the Black Hills.” Todrys examines the paths by which Native “water protectors,” many of them teenagers, and non-Native allies came together to resist Dakota Access’ legal onslaught. Not all of the Native people in the pipeline’s path joined in that resistance: She portrays one politician who made a fortune with an energy subcontracting firm of his own, which secured jobs for “oil companies that ostensibly operated under his tribe’s regulation” but pretty much did what they pleased. Those companies scored an early victory with the Trump administration. As it greenlighted the abrogation of tribal sovereign rights, it also relaxed environmental regulations and cheered the arrests of some 600 water protectors. Many Republican-led states, meanwhile, promulgated bills “aimed at restricting the right to peaceful assembly” so that similar protests could not be mounted again. Yet, as Todrys writes in this wide-ranging account, the legal wheels turn slowly. In March 2020, a federal judge demanded that the Army Corps of Engineers conduct the complete environmental review that Trump officials had dispensed with—a review that is ongoing under a new administration and that may close the pipeline, which has since leaked nearly 600,000 gallons of crude oil across the Dakotas.
An important work of environmental and legal reportage on a contest that will likely continue for years.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4962-2266-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.
The noted historian and New Yorker staffer looks into a future ruled by machines.
Thirty-odd years ago, writes Lepore, liberal democracies of old were being transformed into both authoritarian or autocratic regimes and by “automatocracy, rule by automation, government by machine-driven computation, prediction, and persuasion.” In this pointed rejoinder to Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which foresaw a world in which humans were essentially superfluous, Lepore charts a long history that extends deep into the “machine age,” beginning in the 17th century, which saw “the artificial as existing not only outside the natural but above it, an improvement upon it.” In this conception, humans were fallible, while machines faithfully and unfailingly obeyed the rules set for them. A logical progression followed in the 1920s with the rise of the Technocracy movement, a variety of fascism widely accepted in the U.S. that held that far from being free and equal, humans should be governed by scientists and engineers who alone “have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of twentieth-century life.” It’s a short hop from there to the present, with tech billionaires pushing AI and, in the case of the influential “self-described ‘neo-monarchist’” Curtis Yarvin, a dictatorship aided by it. In all this, Lepore writes, it is not just the human animal that suffers but all animals and all habitats, which can only worsen with the incessant demands for energy, rare earths, and water that AI requires. And what “humans crave, in that artificial world, is nature,” a nature that is increasingly silenced. This undemocratic world, benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of all else, is a prison of screens and keyboards from which, she writes memorably, “What is required is to imagine an escape, and then to conduct it.”
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781324098423
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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