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
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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