An engrossing personal and professional account of fighting for ecological justice and establishing a pro-environment...
An activist addresses a constitutional approach to protecting natural resources.
In this debut book, van Rossum shares stories from her decades running a nonprofit organization focused on maintaining the Delaware River as well as accounts from both citizen and professional activists around the country. She paints an optimistic picture—though one that is realistic about ongoing challenges—of the development of constitutionally driven strategies for counteracting and preventing pollution. The volume focuses on the importance of including the right to a clean environment in state constitutions, highlighting successful legal challenges to fracking and mining in Pennsylvania and Montana made possible by clauses in their governing documents. “What would happen if people everywhere began asserting their inalienable right to a clean and healthy environment,” the author asks, “rising up when industry and their political allies trample on that right?” Van Rossum presents a convincing argument for the need for such clauses, using cases from around the country in which the existing legal and regulatory structure has done little to protect farms from fracking, rivers from toxic chemicals, and watersheds from pipelines, with complex topics explained in simple language and a thorough notes section documenting her in-depth research. In addition to examining the legal framework, the author also offers counterarguments for economic concerns about expanded environmental regulations. A concluding chapter provides tactics for readers interested in pursuing constitutional remedies in their home states. Although the prose is occasionally overwrought (“I shuddered at the massive, open-cut wound through the wilderness”), the book succeeds in the many pages in which it allows those whose health and livelihoods have been damaged by pollution to tell their own tales. In addition, the author coherently presents scientific research that clearly shows the harm caused. Van Rossum does not mince words when it comes to describing problems of pipelines, natural gas production, industrial waste, and overdevelopment, but the reader is more likely to feel hopeful than overwhelmed at the work’s conclusion.
An engrossing personal and professional account of fighting for ecological justice and establishing a pro-environment constitutional framework.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63331-021-6
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Disruption Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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