An energy book that’s a pleasure to read and sure to win new solar converts.
A detailed blueprint for a solar-powered, all-electric future.
In this bright treatise, Stayton outlines how humanity might transition from finite, carbon dioxide–emitting fossil fuels to permanent, pollution-free solar power by the end of this century. His key points are that people must curtail carbon emissions; that solar photovoltaic electricity can meet people’s needs better than alternatives can; and that the exponential growth of solar installations shows that the shift has already begun. The author has a master’s degree in physics, college teaching experience, and years of living off the grid. He expertly blends scientific research, historical context, personal experience, and visionary thinking in this book and relates it all in plain language. He has a gift for demystifying things, from horsepower and steam engines to gigawatts and thorium reactors. His examples are practical (“A joule is the energy needed to raise a three-quarter pound book by a foot, such as lifting a book to the next higher shelf”), and he uses concise, declarative sentences to make his points: “Every five days, the Sun delivers the energy equivalent of all the fossil fuel reserves in the world.” He also avoids polemics: “Ocean acidification is the smoking gun evidence that convicts fossil fuel emissions of harming the planet. You don’t need to believe in climate change to accept that fact.” But although many readers may believe that the facts, and logic, make a shift to solar power inevitable, Stayton’s timeline appears too optimistic, as it requires 20 percent annual growth in solar installations for decades as well as improvements in storage systems. Also shadowing his sunny scenario is a cloud of powerful interests that stand to lose billions of dollars if fossil fuels go unused. Stayton devotes only a short chapter to this opposition—confident that collective, individual choices will drive the transformation. Whatever the pace of solar adoption, however, Stayton does manage to clarify the feasibility of quitting fossil fuels. Whether readers add rooftop solar panels to their homes or just replace their incandescent bulbs after reading this book, they’ll better understand how energy works, how much humans use (and waste), and why an epochal change is coming.
An energy book that’s a pleasure to read and sure to win new solar converts.Pub Date: April 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9904792-0-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: Sandstone Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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