An expert effectively debunks the false narrative of denialism and advocates communal resistance to fossil fuels.
One of the world’s leading climate scientists embarks on a journey into the minds of climate change deniers to try to understand their motivations and strategies.
Outright climate change denial is no longer acceptable, writes Mann in this blunt, lucid work of climate politics. Lobbyists and publicists for the fossil-fuel industry used to be focused on refuting the scientific evidence—models too unreliable, data too short, natural variability too unknown—but the new climate war is a softer form of denialism that seeks to shift the responsibility for climate change from the corporations who are producing the greenhouse gases to individuals (following the lead of the gun and tobacco industries) in a devious form of deflective accountability. Yes, Mann writes, individuals must act responsibly when it comes to the environment, but the necessary big-picture change will require massive action on the policy level—e.g., the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which combatted ozone depletion, and the 1990 Clean Air Act. Consistently displaying his comprehensive command of climate science and the attendant politics, he clearly walks readers through the disingenuous arguments about carbon pricing; the mechanics of receiving governmental incentives for renewable energy; how the energy market lacks sufficient incentives to build a new infrastructure; solar and wind energy scare tactics in right-wing media; the pitfalls of “clean” coal and geoengineering; “doomism,” which “leads us down the same path of inaction as outright denial of the threat”; and carbon budgeting (“every bit of carbon we avoid burning prevents additional damage. There is both urgency and agency”). Mann is a cautious optimist—he even sees signs of accountability in some Republican lawmakers—and he hopes that the Covid-19 pandemic will teach us something about ideologically driven science denialism. The author recommends a “delicate middle ground”: Individual action includes pressuring “politicians to support climate-friendly governmental policies,” and collective action seeks to solve systemic problems.
An expert effectively debunks the false narrative of denialism and advocates communal resistance to fossil fuels.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-5823-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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