A well-argued analysis of climate adaptation in contemporary America.
An expert on environmental policy explores the social implications of climate change in this nonfiction work, the third in a series.
“This book will make those with privilege feel uncomfortable,” declares Collin in the book’s opening lines, observing that “environmental elite individuals and organizations” have the privilege to adapt to climate change in ways that blue-collar and marginalized communities can’t. Central to the author’s underlying argument is the assertion that the growing “climate divide” between elite and blue-collar communities is not “inevitable” but the result of policies, systems, and deliberate decisions made by people—and, thus, the divide “can be changed by people.” Collin emphasizes the difference between resilience—which he defines as a system’s ability to “absorb shocks and return to baseline”—and flourishing, which describes social adaptations that markedly improve people’s lives, health, and sense of dignity. While the author is well versed in the nuances of contemporary environmental justice, what stands out is his ability to contextualize America’s current moment of “environmental elitism” within a framework that connects the 21st century to a history of colonial abuses. As he notes, “Climate adaptation now brings these long-standing dynamics into sharper relief.” (Even early conservationists embraced a worldview that left the urban poor with a degraded infrastructure while providing wealthier communities with parks, tree canopies, and wilderness escapes.) The final volume in a three-book series on climate change, this work powerfully reframes conversations on climate change to include the broader implications of our current socioeconomic system, asking “whether we can flourish together in a warming world.” The author of more than a half dozen books on climate change and environmental justice, Collin effectively blends his deep understanding of the topic (the text is supported by scholarly references) with the passion of an activist and the logical precision of a lawyer. Rather than just criticizing preexisting systems, Collin provides pragmatic solutions.
A well-argued analysis of climate adaptation in contemporary America.Pub Date: April 6, 2026
ISBN: 9798248798254
Page Count: 315
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
