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 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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