An engaging state of the union by an important leader in solar power.
Pioneering solar power entrepreneur Williams (Chasing the Sun: Solar Adventures Around the World, 2005) chronicles how he left journalism to become an advocate for the distribution of solar energy around the world.
In 1979, the author was invited to join President Jimmy Carter's newly formed Department of Energy to help promote the use of solar power. At the time, nuclear power was still in the ascendancy, and the program did not take off. Nonetheless, five years after Carter left office, “the country was using 15 percent less electricity…[due to] government sponsored energy saving programs.” This was the beginning of the author’s dream to transform the lives of the billions of people living in the developing sector who lacked access to electricity—by making it possible for them to purchase individual solar installations. Since the cost of extending the electric grid to these remote villages was prohibitive, photovoltaic cells would be competitive, and they would not “[destroy] the global environment.” Williams developed a plan to set up a nonprofit organization that would be a pilot program to demonstrate the feasibility of his vision. His job would be to solicit funds and then look for countries where he could apply his “concept of small-is-beautiful solar power for householders” and recruit locals to run the project. In 1990, he launched the Solar Electric Light Fund, which sold solar installations at cost, with grants from the World Bank, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and other major philanthropic institutions. This pilot project succeeded brilliantly in proving the viability of a commercial market for solar energy in the developing sector, and it laid the basis for major government-sponsored programs in India and China. Today, with the reduced cost of photovoltaic cells, “America is now the world's fifth-biggest solar market, after Germany, Spain, Italy, and China.”
An engaging state of the union by an important leader in solar power.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3377-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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