An engaging tome packed with statistics, personal stories, and helpful suggestions.
Gianturco and Sangster present a guide to organizing grassroots movements to help combat climate change.
The authors sound a powerful call to arms in the fight against global warming; as they write, “we can’t wait for others to figure this out for us.” Entries in their guide include “Increasing Awareness” and “Reducing Emissions,” which feature interviews with various female movers and shakers in the world of environmental health. A “What You Can Do” section ends each chapter, with suggestions like “make changes on your property to support ecosystems where you live,” and “get involved in your city or community’s planning council.” The interviews are edifying, including a conversation with Nelleke Van Der Puil, Vice President of Materials for LEGO. The toy company has pledged to be 100% sustainable by 2030 and has already created more than 80 LEGO brick shapes from sugar cane that look and feel identical to the old plastic ones. The authors offer statistics to support their assertion that women are especially effective leaders in combating global warming, and they make it as easy for the reader to get involved by including a QR code list that can be scanned to get started on various projects, including “help a woman entrepreneur bring solar power to her community in rural Africa” or “take action with a global network of women environmental and climate leaders.” A combination of regular printed text and handwritten slogans, peppered alongside wildly colorful pictures and photographs of activists around the world, creates a visually chaotic yet appealing layout. There are copious facts and figures provided, but the clearly defined blocks of text don’t overwhelm readers with large amounts of information all at once. Instead, this upbeat primer provides a fresh, inspiring, and fun look at how everyone can make an impact when it comes to protecting the planet.
An engaging tome packed with statistics, personal stories, and helpful suggestions.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 9781576879542
Page Count: 186
Publisher: powerHouse Books
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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