An energetic and upbeat action plan to help boomers address climate change issues.
MacDonald presents a pragmatic look at how and why older citizens should tackle climate crisis.
This entry in the Resetting Our Future series focuses on the baby boomer generation’s connection to the issue of climate change. Many readers in that demographic have likely winced when young climate activists like Greta Thunberg have proclaimed in public speeches, “You don’t give a damn about us”; the author, himself a boomer, assembles here a wide range of actions (and self-evaluations) that concerned older people can take to make a difference in the existential crisis facing human society. “I know from my own experience that facing the reality of a looming global catastrophe can cause anxiety, grief, even depression,” MacDonald writes. “Working with others helps to overcome these feelings, bringing renewed hope, courage, and joy.” He describes familiar steps his cohort can take—things like eating less meat, doing less driving (and no flying), moving their money out of banks that prop up the fossil fuel industry, and switching to solar power. The author lists a great many climate initiative organizations boomers can join (or follow for informed news) and touches on every aspect of climate activism, from its connection to major faith traditions to the logistics of start-up campaigns. Each chapter ends with an inset “Action Checklist.” MacDonald’s wide-ranging approach is presented in prose that’s both clear and unfailingly encouraging. He directly addresses the sense of overwhelmed defeat that many boomers feel in the face of the enormity of climate change and encourages them to confront the subject directly—up to and including getting arrested: “If millions of boomers and others who say they are prepared to engage in climate-related civil disobedience actually did so,” he writes, “would it make a difference? Yes!” This guide will send readers forth feeling empowered and optimistic.
An energetic and upbeat action plan to help boomers address climate change issues.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781803414843
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Changemakers Books
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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