Coleman-Adebayo’s memoir recounts the legal battle culminating in the 2002 No FEAR Act, “the first civil-rights and whistleblower act of the 21st century.”
Steeped in the history of the civil-rights and women’s movements and blessed with a keen intellect, the author earned degrees from Barnard College, Columbia University and MIT. In 1990, she was on track toward a promising career with the EPA, considered one of the most progressive federal agencies. However, Coleman-Adebayo soon sensed that all was not well. Pay discrepancies ran along racial and gender lines, and white men dominated the ranks of the executives. During a trip to South Africa as a member of the Gore-Mbeki Commission, the author witnessed the “systematic, verifiable, environmentally devastating” effects of vanadium mining, a metal considered strategic by the CIA. She was quickly stymied by her superiors in her efforts at solving the South African environmental issues. Once she reported her belief that “the EPA [was] covering up crimes…being committed by an American multinational corporation against the people of South Africa,” to the Washington Post, she became a whistleblower. Workplace retaliation was swift, resulting in her filing a complaint against the EPA. Weaving together her personal records with the transcript of the federal civil trial, in which she prevailed, the author provides an insider view of the legal tactics used at the highest level of government. Coleman-Adebayo also recounts the shenanigans surrounding the subsequent hearings and the strenuous political process involved in the unanimous passage in both houses of Congress of the No FEAR Act. Though the narrative bogs down in a large cast of characters, this is an inspiring and worthwhile trek through one woman’s brave battle against a system favoring the powerful.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55652-818-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
A slim, somber classic.
Didion (We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction, 2006, etc.) delivers a second masterpiece on grief, considering both her daughter’s death and her inevitable own.
In her 2005 book, The Year of Magical Thinking, the much-decorated journalist laid bare her emotions following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The same year that book was published, she also lost her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, after a long hospitalization. Like Magical Thinking, this book is constructed out of close studies of particular memories and bits of medical lingo. Didion tests Quintana’s childhood poems and scribblings for hints of her own failings as a mother, and she voices her helplessness at the hands of doctors. “I put the word ‘diagnosis’ in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a ‘diagnosis’ led to a ‘cure,’ ” she writes. The author also ponders her own mortality, and she does so with heartbreaking specificity. A metal folding chair, as she describes it, is practically weaponized, ready to do her harm should she fall out of it; a fainting spell leaves her bleeding and helpless on the floor of her bedroom. Didion’s clipped, recursive sentences initially make the book feel arid and emotionally distant. But she’s profoundly aware of tone and style—a digression about novel-writing reveals her deep concern for the music sentences make—and the chapters become increasingly freighted with sorrow without displaying sentimentality. The book feels like an epitaph for both her daughter and herself, as she considers how much aging has demolished her preconceptions about growing old.
A slim, somber classic.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-26767-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.
Distinguished natural history writer and explorer Lopez (Outside, 2014, etc.) builds a winning memoir around books, voyages, and biological and anthropological observations.
“Traveling, despite the technological innovations that have brought cultural homogenization to much of the world, helps the curious and attentive itinerant understand how deep the notion goes that one place is never actually like another.” So writes the author, who has made a long career of visiting remote venues such as Antarctica, Greenland, and the lesser known of the Galápagos Islands. From these travels he has extracted truths about the world, such as the fact that places differ as widely as the people who live in them. Even when traveling with scientists from his own culture, Lopez finds differences of perception. On an Arctic island called Skraeling, for instance, he observes that if he and the biologists he is walking with were to encounter a grizzly feeding on a caribou, he would focus on the bear, the scientists on the whole gestalt of bear, caribou, environment; if a native of the place were along, the story would deepen beyond the immediate event, for those who possess Indigenous ways of knowledge, “unlike me…felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning.” The author’s chapter on talismans—objects taken from his travels, such as “a fist-size piece of raven-black dolerite”—is among the best things he has written. But there are plentiful gems throughout the looping narrative, its episodes constructed from adventures over eight decades: trying to work out a bit of science as a teenager while huddled under the Ponte Vecchio after just having seen Botticelli’s Venus; admiring a swimmer as a septuagenarian while remembering the John Steinbeck whom he’d met as a schoolboy; gazing into the surf over many years’ worth of trips to Cape Foulweather, an Oregon headland named by Capt. James Cook, of whom he writes, achingly, “we no longer seem to be sailing in a time of fixed stars, of accurate chronometers, and of reliable routes.”
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.Pub Date: March 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-394-58582-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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