Compelling multidisciplinary treatise on how progress toward sustainability can be achieved during our lifetime.
A professor of political science and environmental policy at Harvey Mudd College cogently explores the ways in which individuals, corporations, local and national governments, and international organizations can stem damage to the environment.
Opening with a query concerning the efficacy of individual recycling when the environment is constantly under assault from so many other quarters, Steinberg (co-editor: Comparative Environmental Politics: Theory, Practice, and Prospects, with Stacy D. VanDever, 2012) offers case studies showing how various groups have contributed to either improving or destroying our planet. While it may be easy to characterize corporations as greedy vessels of harm, Steinberg provides examples of companies that have worked to combat environmental damage. Steinberg’s work is academic in nature, but he writes in such a manner as to be approachable for general readers. Each of his case studies opens with something familiar or comprehensible—a walk on the beach or a personal story about his time in the Peace Corps, for example—then expands to explore broader associated issues. Most of these studies reveal that the United States lags behind Europe and Canada in public policy that will protect our planet. However, although Steinberg focuses on the role of politics in exercising environmental policy, he maintains a neutral tone; still, to the potential surprise of liberals, many of these protective policies were enacted during the Nixon and Reagan presidencies. A variety of black-and-whiteillustrations enhance the text with graphs, photographs, tables, and archival reproductions (particularly poignant is a vintage advertisement showing a young boy exhorting his father to use leaded gas to improve their car’s speed). Most of Steinberg’s accounts are contemporary, but he does trace historical backgrounds to the 18th century. Rather than hopelessness for the irreparable damage already done, Steinberg offers the conclusion that a multifaceted approach of social change, government regulation (of the right kind), international cooperation, and corporate compliance could offer the same measure of improvement as those same factors once contributed to environmental harm.
Compelling multidisciplinary treatise on how progress toward sustainability can be achieved during our lifetime.Pub Date: March 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0199896615
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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