In her skillfully told work of advocacy, Blake offers a call to arms against poisoning for profit.
A sharp-edged report on the world that toxic chemicals—and their manufacturers—have made.
The large class of chemicals called perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are pervasive in industrial use. As investigative journalist Blake writes, they “transformed thousands of everyday items—dental floss, clothing, furniture, food packaging, and carpet, to name just a few.” Because they are ubiquitous and have a long half-life, they are also known as “forever chemicals,” with frightening consequence. Blake adds, they “have been linked to obesity, infertility, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, neurological problems, immune suppression, and life-threatening pregnancy complications, among numerous other maladies.” As her book chronicles alongside accounts of lawsuits and testimonials by ordinary citizens, even as our bodies are now awash in these chemicals, some bodies are less equal than others: In the largely rural places where they are manufactured, PFAS seep into water tables, befoul farm fields, and even turn up in organic foods and wild game. They and kindred chemicals are now even carried by rainwater, making the whole planet, as one report Blake cites puts it, “outside the safe operating space” for human and animal life. Fortunately, Blake writes, something is being done: The European Commission has banned the production and sale of PFAS, and some states—including Minnesota, where 3M and other manufacturers made heavy use of them—prohibit or strictly control them, for all the dodges and loopholes industry has introduced into law through its lobbyists. (As Blake notes, meaningfully, it was Big Chemical that “invented many of the methods that Big Tobacco and other industries would later deploy to pick apart the science tying lucrative products to disease.”) More needs to be done, of course, since the battle has been joined anew, and on shifting ground, with the Trump administration having shown little interest in protecting consumer safety or regulating industry.
In her skillfully told work of advocacy, Blake offers a call to arms against poisoning for profit.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781524760090
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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