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
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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