A rallying cry for readers who feel ripped off at the gas pumps.
In this fiery collection of blog posts, veteran commodities trader Learsy (Oil and Finance, 2012, etc.) rails against the global oil-industry.
According to the oil industry, oil is a commodity that’s subject to the forces of supply and demand. But this is far from the complete truth, writes Learsy, a regular contributor to the Huffington Post who made his fortune as founder of a worldwide commodities trading firm. Oil prices, he asserts, are captive to the machinations of commodity speculators, investment banks, OPEC and petroleum heavyweights such as Russia. These entrenched interests can influence U.S. policy at the highest levels, he says, and distort prices for their own benefits. “We are robbed of billions of dollars every day by oil interests, in their manipulation of the market pricing mechanisms, at massive cost and risk to the world’s economy,” he writes. Penned with a hefty dose of what the author calls “rightful anger,” the book looks at a turbulent 18-month period from January 2012 to May 2013 that witnessed the 2012 U.S. presidential election, oil prices spiking more than 9 percent in a single day and revelations of JP Morgan Chase’s “London Whale” trading debacle. Learsy’s blog entries address a range of oil-related topics, and his central theme soon emerges: The oil market has been hijacked by profiteers who game the system. Learsy alleges cronyism and inept oversight by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the U.S. Department of Energy, Congress, the courts and multiple presidential administrations. His posts combine insider knowledge and trenchant wit, and he isn’t afraid to rebuke people when he feels they deserve it—including former Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi and JP Morgan Chase head Jamie Dimon. The book suffers, however, from a limitation that’s common to blog-based collections: Its brief chapters whiz past like a series of editorials instead of probing deeper like an investigative exposé. That said, the author’s stated goal is to educate everyday consumers, and as such, the book effectively elbows its way into the growing Main-Street-fights-back genre.
A rallying cry for readers who feel ripped off at the gas pumps.Pub Date: July 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475994520
Page Count: 276
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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