A convincing case for removing highways and shaping cities meant for people, not cars.
An extended argument against car culture and the continuing proliferation of highways.
Austin-based journalist Kimble has been witnessing firsthand the consequences of living in the country’s fastest-growing metropolitan area, with its lack of affordable housing, sprawling urban footprint, and increasing traffic gridlock. Traveling through the eight miles of downtown via the north-south interstate used to take eight minutes, but by 2019, that had stretched to 32 minutes; in 2045, it is expected to take 223 minutes. The more sensible alternative would be improved public transit, but “transit functions best when it connects people across densely occupied places,” which doesn’t describe so much of urban Texas, with metro Dallas–Fort Worth “covering more area than the states of Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island combined.” Kimble’s case studies center mostly on Texas cities, with forays into the experiences of highway architects and anti-highway activists elsewhere. While the book is full of solid information and sometimes appalling data, to say nothing of sound arguments for such things as reenvisioning the federal government’s role in funding, it’s overlong and could have benefited from a little less purely anecdotal, human-interest journalism. Still, Kimble capably proposes a sustained rethinking of urban infrastructure, untangling highways from cities that serve as chokepoints and recognizing more widely the long-established fact that traffic expands to fill such motorway space as is made available to it, so that no road, however new and shiny, ever does a thing to ease the jam. We’ve been going at it in exactly the opposite direction, notes the author. “Between 1993 and 2017,” she writes, “the hundred largest urbanized areas in the United States spent more than $500 billion adding new freeways or expanding existing ones”—and the resulting congestion far outstripped the rate of population growth.
A convincing case for removing highways and shaping cities meant for people, not cars.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780593443781
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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