A guide to living a life kinder to the environment offers solutions to everyday challenges.
A grassroots do-it-yourself guide to environmentally friendly living.
“How do you, dear reader, find out if you really are an eco warrior or an unwitting eco poser?” asks popular YouTuber Paul Wheaton and co-author Klassen-Koop in their lively and engaging debut. Wheaton is a practiced communicator who relays lessons about the environment in clear, simple terms, and he acknowledges that a great many people react to dire world news by getting angry at the people they perceive as the bad guys in any situation when they’d feel better if they took positive action themselves. “For nearly every global problem,” he writes, “there are solutions we can implement in our backyard that save us money and help us live more luxuriant lives.” Wheaton hopes to counteract companies’ “greenwashing” of gullible consumers who want to do the right thing. Toward that end he lays out in great detail all kinds of ways people can drastically reduce waste that harms the environment while actually improving the quality of their day-to-day life. His suggestions include thought-provoking ideas about being a vegan versus an omnivore and about recycling, easily the most immediately pragmatic advice for general readers, including a tip on what do to with pizza boxes: “use the cardboard as a fire starter.” Heating costs, which Wheaton sees as the most important element of his plan, will present readers with challenges they might be unwilling to take up. For instance, Wheaton advocates keeping a home cold in winter except for discrete spots that people are using at the moment, and he also strenuously recommends a device called a “rocket mass heater” that he claims is much more effective than a wood-burning stove. But even if readers don’t buy into all of his solutions, they’ll find an enormous amount of useful information about living a greener and simpler life, generously illustrated with black-and-white artwork.
A guide to living a life kinder to the environment offers solutions to everyday challenges.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9991714-0-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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