An optimistic and often enthralling book of advocacy for environmental justice.
A treatise on the current environmental crisis by committed attorney.
This timely, expanded second edition of van Rossum’s 2017 brief for environmental reform contains extra chapters and forewords by actor and activist Mark Ruffalo and Kerri Evelyn Harris, former candidate for the U.S. Senate from Delaware. In it, van Rossum takes a strong personal and professional stand against corporations’ profiting from exploitation of natural resources. From the start, she draws on numerous anecdotes to make her points, such as a visit she made to her late mother’s forested property in Central Pennsylvania, during which she heard that oil companies were buying up surrounding property, and the story of one of the nation’s most polluted elementary schools, in Manchester, Texas. Van Rossum uses these accounts to advocate for protective “constitutional environmental rights”—or “Green Amendments”—in every state’s constitution. The author combines experts’ evaluations with historical context and personal tales from her decades of nonprofit work to paint a clear picture of where the nation stands. And the verdict of this research is critical: More people die annually from pollution than from war, she points out, citing a report from United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. National laws often accommodate corporations, she asserts, despite evidence of their contributions to the environmental crisis. Fracking, gas pipelines, and overdevelopment are all shown to bear deadly consequences. For van Rossum, however, there’s hope. While addressing counterarguments and economic fears, the author insists that “Democracy will reign, our natural environments will be protected, and our economies will grow and prosper.” In this convincing argument for environmental reform, she presents complex principles in lay terms, and a concluding chapter that will likely encourage many readers to take concrete action in favor of the Green Amendments; it not only provides specifics on how each state amends its constitution but also offers practical ways to get other people enthusiastic about the cause. The volume can sometimes be repetitive, but van Rossum expertly balances science, law, and an engaging narrative to convey an urgent need for reform.
An optimistic and often enthralling book of advocacy for environmental justice.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63331-064-3
Page Count: 365
Publisher: Disruption Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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