An admirable effort to shine a spotlight in places light rarely reaches.
A carter in England’s North West exposes what he belives are blatantly phony recycling claims by a competitor and suggests that the solid waste sector of the United Kingdom’s fledgling green economy may be an empty shell.
The author runs into the nearly absolute inability of bureaucracies and government agencies to act decisively on complaints except in cases where extreme pressure is brought by powerful people or forces. Farmer, the managing director of a carting company in the Manchester area, describes himself as a man of straw, a dust-bin man and the like, and certainly lacks any great influence despite a quixotic run for parliament in 2010 that wins him few votes. Add to this some peculiar laws in the U.K. that make it especially difficult to go after a wrongdoer hammer and tong. For him to accuse a competitor of falsely advertising a 95 percent recycling rate puts him in jeopardy of a defamation charge, and indeed this is what the competitor in question quickly threatens. With the press also constrained by some of the same quirky British laws, Farmer’s story has struggled for a public airing. Certainly any journalist worth his or her salt will immediately recognize in Farmer an invaluable source whose own investigative and journalistic instincts add weight to what he says. In the larger picture, Farmer’s account of false recycling claims is not enough by itself to support an exposé of how bogus “green” claims play out in a marketplace where environmentalism may all too often get lip service while regulators look the other way. But what he alleges would be a very telling case in point for a broader exposé. Farmer is to be congratulated for his dogged efforts to blow the whistle as long and loud as possible—writing this book is the culmination of that. But there is a caveat. Any third-person examination of the charges he raises would require substantial investigation and a full airing of his competitor’s counter-claims. Without further independent investigation, and notwithstanding the documents Farmer includes in the book, the story per force remains one-sided.
An admirable effort to shine a spotlight in places light rarely reaches.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456797973
Page Count: 120
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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