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
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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