A thorough retelling of an environmental tragedy and a renewed call for corporate accountability.
A deeply researched history of a significant 1977 environmental disaster.
In this work of investigative reporting, O’Brien narrates a tale of corporate malfeasance and inaction, governmental response (or lack thereof), and, above all, inspiring citizen activism in the face of harrowing circumstances. Underneath the LaSalle neighborhood in suburban Niagara Falls, a company called Hooker Chemical had long filled a forgotten waterway, known as the Love Canal by locals, with chemical waste. By the late 1970s, residents noticed the stench of chemicals, clouds of fumes, gas leaks, spontaneous ignitions, and terrible health repercussions. O'Brien, a longtime NPR contributor, describes the personalities of a large cast of characters, including town officials, company executives, EPA administrators, Al Gore, Gov. Hugh Carey, Jane Fonda, even President Jimmy Carter. Thankfully, the author maintains the focus on the grassroots leaders and blue-collar workers who stood up to Hooker and its negligent corporate overseer, Occidental Petroleum. One government report noted “that a wide range of chemical compounds dumped in this industrial landfill might pose a substantial health hazard” to local residents. Other studies pointed out an "unusually high incidence" of miscarriages, birth defects, and malignancies, as in the tragic death of 6-year-old Jon Allen, a heartbreaking story fully recounted here. Evacuation of homes, relocation of residents, and toxic remediation work all proved daunting, as O'Brien's patient chronology of the crisis bears out. Part of the solution turned out to be national and sweeping: federal financing to address thousands of poisoned landfills across the country. At the end of the Carter administration, Congress passed the Superfund Act, $1.6 billion funded “almost exclusively” by polluting companies. Unfortunately, in 1995, the Republican-led Congress let the corporate tax component lapse. Citizen activist Lois Gibbs, whose evolution as an organizer and spokesperson runs throughout the narrative, receives the honorary title of "Mother of the Superfund." Readers who have followed Gibbs through years know that she has earned the laurels.
A thorough retelling of an environmental tragedy and a renewed call for corporate accountability.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-31843-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.
A deeply informed critique of the malicious initiatives currently using gender as a political tool to arouse fear and strengthen political and religious institutions.
In their latest book, following The Force of Nonviolence, Butler, the noted philosopher and gender studies scholar, documents and debunks the anti-gender ideology of the right, the core principle of which is that male and female are natural categories whose recognition is essential for the survival of the family, nations, and patriarchal order. Its proponents reject “sex” as a malleable category infused with prior political and cultural understandings. By turning gender into a “phantasmatic scene,” they enable those in positions of authority to deflect attention from such world-destroying forces as war, predatory capitalism, and climate change. Butler explores the ideology’s presence in the U.S., the U.K., Uganda, and Hungary, countries where legislation has limited the rights of trans and homosexual people and denied them their sexual identity. The author also delves into the ideology’s roots among Evangelicals and the Catholic Church and such political leaders as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Butler is particularly bothered by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who treat trans women as “male predators in disguise.” For the author, “the gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never be fully closed.” They imagine “a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable” and calls for alliances across differences and “a radical democracy informed by socialist values.” Butler compensates for the thinness of some of their recommendations with an astute dissection of the ideology’s core ideas and impressive grasp of its intellectual pretensions. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy.
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780374608224
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
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