An essential, inspired chorus of voices echoing the urgency of action in the fight against climate change.
Diverse contributors explore the many dynamics of climate change.
Climate activist Flanagan launched her environmental justice project during the summer of 2020 amid the “intertwined crises” of surging Covid-19 infections, racial unrest, and California’s epic wildfires. The book features the author “in conversation with 39 women, nonbinary, and gender-expansive climate leaders,” and their impassioned discussions sound the alarm for practical solutions from their areas of expertise within the grassroots climate movement. The text includes important perspectives from Black, Indigenous, people of color, feminist, queer, and other marginalized communities, countering the narrative that Flanagan characterizes as “rooted in more masculine ideals such as efficiency, competition, ego, scale, and domination.” Ruth Miller, of Dena’ina Athabaskan descent, reflects on the effects of climate change in her native Alaska, which experiences the degradation at a drastically faster rate. Olivia Juarez, “a lifelong resident of the Goshute and Eastern Shoshone lands of the Greater Salt Lake region,” advocates for aggressive wilderness preservation, while Emmy Award–winning actor Casey Camp-Horinek promotes the Rights of Nature Movement, which realigns natural law with human law. Native Los Angeles holistic ecologist Heather Rosenberg works to solve some of her region’s issues with a multipronged approach using the LA River as a model. Nonbinary educator Ceci Pineda discusses how queer communities intersect with climate futures and demonstrates the power of a community composting initiative as a method of methane emission reduction. Other contributors introduce initiatives such as seedkeeping, eco-friendly prescribed burns, and fossil fuel resistance. Most importantly, the book offers “resilience tool spotlight” segments as resources for readers to directly connect and participate in these movements. Each impassioned essay is highly educational as well as encouraging, and the cross-cultural, inclusive perspectives show the power of proactive, real-world climate solutions. The book includes a helpful glossary.
An essential, inspired chorus of voices echoing the urgency of action in the fight against climate change.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781623179021
Page Count: 256
Publisher: North Atlantic
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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