Profound cultural scope deepens Hawken’s exceptional science writing.
An impassioned call for a return to traditional environmental stewardship.
It is hard to overestimate how the accelerating collapse of ecosystems and species is related to how modern societies and their increasingly homogenized languages are losing the deep sense of place critical to protecting the land. So argues environmental activist Hawken, who says we ignore the knowledge embedded in Indigenous languages and customs at our peril. These marginalized or endangered cultures whose languages guided traditional guardianship of the land possess the ages-old understanding of how to avoid the calamities of environmental decline in the first place. In a scathing, if familiar, indictment of the denatured Western food industry, industrial farming, chemical companies, and ruinous logging and mining—among other depredations—Hawken marshals indisputable evidence that continuing on our current path is suicidal. He knows full well how entrenched the “overwhelming array of industrial forces lined up against the living world” can be and that most people simply do not understand the planetary and social risks we confront. It is the real subject of a book whose scaffolding is the pervasiveness and functions of the element of carbon in planetary life, as well as the challenges it presents. Hawken’s survey of the science involved is as cogent as it is extensive, from the macro to the micro, and it’s often a fascinating journey. There’s a very fine book of popular science here that sometimes struggles with its own ideological noise. Were it not for this, the book would be in the same class as Zoë Schlanger’s recent The Light Eaters, with which it shares broad similarities. But for all the depressing realities, Hawken sees reasons for hope that we will reverse our heedlessly destructive ways, even in the current political climate.
Profound cultural scope deepens Hawken’s exceptional science writing.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780525427445
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
For fans only.
The hoodie-and-shorts-clad Pennsylvania senator blends the political and personal, and often not nicely.
Fetterman’s memoir addresses three major themes. The first—and the one he leads with—is depression and mental illness, which, combined with a stroke and heart trouble, brought him to a standstill and led him to contemplate suicide. The second is his rise to national-level politics from a Rust Belt town; as he writes, he’s carved a path as a contentious player with a populist streak and a dislike for elites. There are affecting moments in his personal reminiscences, especially when he writes of the lives of his working-class neighbors in impoverished southwestern Pennsylvania, its once-prosperous Monongahela River Valley “the most heartbreaking drive in the United States.” It’s the third element that’s problematic, and that’s his in-the-trenches account of daily politics. One frequent complaint is the media, as when he writes of one incident, “I am not the first public figure to get fucked by a reporter, and I won’t be the last. What was eye-opening was the window it gave into how people with disabilities navigate a world that doesn’t give a shit.” He reserves special disdain for his Senate race opponent Mehmet Oz, about whom he wonders, “If I had run against any other candidate…would I have lost? He got beaten by a guy recovering from a stroke.” Perhaps so, and Democratic stalwarts will likely be dismayed at his apparent warmish feelings for Donald Trump and dislike of his own party’s “performative protests.” If Fetterman’s book convinces a troubled soul to seek help, it will have done some good, but it’s hard to imagine that it will make much of an impression in the self-help literature. One wonders, meanwhile, at sentiments such as this: “If men are forced to choose between picking their party or keeping their balls, most men are going to choose their balls.”
For fans only.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593799826
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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
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