An optimistic book that downplays the clamorous work of environmental groups and attributes progress to the institutions of...
A wide-ranging history of the American environmental movement.
Allitt (American History/Emory Univ.; The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History, 2009, etc.) offers a readable account that will provoke and displease many environmentalists. Few of the issues facing the nation—from overpopulation in the 1950s to air and water pollution in the ’60s to genetically modified foods in the ’90s to climate change today—warranted the accompanying moods of crisis, which were “usually disproportionate to the actual danger involved.” Most problems were manageable, but they were exaggerated due to media sensationalism, environmental scientists seeking recognition, the needs of a growing environmental establishment and the beneficial effects of crises on environmental groups’ memberships. “When the nation mobilized the political will it was effective in providing remedies,” writes Allitt, celebrating actions on pesticides, toxic dumps, endangered species and other issues. However, he overlooks the fact that to mobilize political will, environmental groups had to fight for attention, waging information campaigns and sounding alarms, often in the face of strong, well-financed opposition, so that the public would eventually demand legislative action. Allitt’s things-will-take-care-of-themselves view, based on sympathy with counterenvironmentalists’ ideas, informs his book. He covers major individuals and controversies over six decades, showing how Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson created constituencies for mainstream environmentalism—a mass movement by 1970—and Edward Abbey inspired activists. Highly politicized issues pitted critics, who viewed green advocates as selfish elitists, against environmentalists who saw opponents as cynical and greedy. Allitt notes Congress passed 28 major environmental laws in the decade before 1980, when President Ronald Reagan began dismantling many regulations and sparked a conservative counterenvironmentalism. Allitt dismisses the “false” claims of impending catastrophe associated with climate change, which he deems “another real but manageable problem.”
An optimistic book that downplays the clamorous work of environmental groups and attributes progress to the institutions of democracy and capitalism.Pub Date: March 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-466-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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