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
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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