by Paul F. Steinberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2015
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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
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