A rightfully urgent call to ban the Bomb—and stat.
Nobody ever said a nuclear holocaust would be nice. Here’s a book to prove it.
The odds are depressingly good that someone, sometime, somewhere will deploy a nuclear weapon. British environmental journalist Lynas reckons it at a probability of about 63% within a century; given that it’s been 80 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that gives us until 2045 to test the prediction. And given wars in Ukraine, Syria, Palestine, and other sundry odd places, the odds may be poorer still, which, by Lynas’ account, ought to put us to worrying about nuclear war more than we do. There’s plenty to worry about, as Lynas counts off the sequelae in grim detail: There’s nuclear winter, for instance, which means that much of the Northern Hemisphere will undergo a new ice age (which is at least a break from global warming). With that ice will come starvation, since crops won’t grow, which raises another unwholesome prospect: Once the canned foods are gone, “the absolute last resort is the consumption of human corpses.” A person might want to go vegan, since those corpses will be irradiated and probably highly carcinogenic. And so on. Lynas takes a too-long side tour into the asteroid-induced nuclear winter that did in the dinosaurs and sent up a tsunami that crested as high as Mont Blanc, but the point is well taken; nukes will do the same trick, and, as the kids say, FAFO. Much of this isn’t new; Jonathan Schell was making many of the same points in his 1982 book, The Fate of the Earth. However, Lynas does a good job of sounding alarms anew and calling for meaningful action: “We cannot be another movement of hippies, eating vegan food in protest camps with smelly compost toilets, and obsessing over women-only spaces,” he writes; instead, we need to bring science and realpolitik to bear if we’re to survive.
A rightfully urgent call to ban the Bomb—and stat.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781399410519
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury Sigma
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
A hopeful civic sermon favoring inspiration over concrete prescriptions.
A New Jersey senator’s moral manifesto.
Booker situates his narrative in the wake of his 2025 record-breaking 25-hour stand on the Senate floor, an act of physical endurance and moral insistence that serves as its animating example. Though not framed as memoir, the episode implicitly positions Booker himself as a model of the virtues he argues are essential to democratic life. Organized around 10 qualities, including agency, vulnerability, truth, perseverance, and grace, the book advances a clear thesis. “In this book, I argue that many Americans who came before us, and many among us today, have consistently proven that virtues are practical: They expand our power, deepen our sense of belonging, and equip us to endure and ultimately prevail.” Booker illustrates this claim through figures such as the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis, whose willingness to endure sacrifice for principle anchors the book’s moral lineage, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose composure under public scrutiny is presented as an example of dignity as civic strength. These portraits reinforce Booker’s belief that character, sustained over time, can shape public life, even when political outcomes remain uncertain or incomplete. He supplements these examples with personal stories drawn from family, faith, and community, delivered with emotional conviction and a tone that remains affirming and carefully calibrated. Much of the narrative reads like an expansive commencement address, earnest and reassuring, offering moral affirmation at moments when readers might reasonably expect sharper confrontation. That rhetorical choice ultimately defines the book’s limits. Booker acknowledges political conflict and compromise, but rarely examines them in depth, and while urging leaders to take moral risks, he avoids sustained reflection on how some of his own political decisions have tested the virtues he promotes. The result is a principled but self-conscious work that affirms shared values while offering little guidance for navigating power and accountability.
A hopeful civic sermon favoring inspiration over concrete prescriptions.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781250436733
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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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