In a genre rife with forecasts of doom and exhortations in favor of frugal living, Prentiss provides impressive evidence...
A surprisingly optimistic analysis of the world’s unsustainable, wasteful energy consumption.
Solving the energy crisis through self-denial is a nonstarter, writes Prentiss (Physics/Harvard Univ.), but it may be unnecessary since “recent U.S. data suggest that increases in energy efficiency and changes in technology mean that decreases in energy use may not require sacrifices.” In fact, “some energy-saving changes have been accompanied by life-style improvements.” Per-capita energy use in the United States has held steady since 1960. The amount of energy required to create a dollar of gross domestic product has fallen steadily and is predicted to drop by another half by 2040. Further improvements are inevitable, and scientific laws do not favor the continued burning of fossil fuels. The second law of thermodynamics guarantees enormous inefficiency in any cyclic heat engine, which includes fossil fuel–burning power plants and the internal combustion engine. An automobile wastes 80-85 percent of gasoline’s energy, but electric motors can be over 99 percent efficient. In the middle chapters, Prentiss explains the design, operation and future role of power sources from water, wind, sun and other renewables. Dense with charts, graphs and equations, these chapters will be difficult going for many general readers but illuminating to those who persist. Ultimately, Prentiss states bluntly that wind power can supply 100 percent of America’s energy needs. Generating power from renewables is already practicable, but wind and sun are often absent, so storage and distribution remain the main barriers. Confident that this is temporary, Prentiss delivers a detailed, definitely not dumbed-down explanation of possible solutions, concluding, “we are on the cusp of an energy revolution, which might significantly improve the lives of almost everyone on earth if only we have the courage to seize the opportunity.”
In a genre rife with forecasts of doom and exhortations in favor of frugal living, Prentiss provides impressive evidence that things may work out just fine.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-674-72502-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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