A solid and cleareyed look at developments in building, transportation, and energy technology.
An engineer and a municipal administrator analyze the future of sustainable building and transportation.
In this science and policy book, debut author Duncan and Webber look at trends in transportation and construction, with a focus on sustainability and efficiency. They offer predictions as to how the industries will evolve and become more entwined in the near future. The volume opens with an overview of what the authors call “megatrends”—the developments in efficiency, automation, and convergence that have driven and continue to propel the transportation and building sectors. Subsequent sections apply those megatrends to the future of building and transportation in greater detail, covering recent innovations, those currently in experimental stages, and potentially groundbreaking changes that still exist only in conceptual form. Each chapter opens with a short vignette (“The bedside alarm sounded its usual aggressive tone and Bob stumbled out of bed and made his way to the bathroom”) that becomes more technologically advanced over the course of the section (“Still hungover from the night before, he hoped the toilet wouldn’t tell the refrigerator not to order any more beer”). As the work gets further into the futures of both building and transportation, the book posits that the two sectors will become increasingly entangled, powered by a rising interconnectedness and their relationships to the system of energy production and distribution, which will undergo its own related evolution. Though the authors wryly acknowledge that the events of the past year suggest the limits of their predictive capacity, the volume concludes that advancements in building and transportation will be major drivers of decreased carbon emissions and will have a net positive impact on the world.
Duncan and Webber do a particularly good job of concisely summing up complex developments (“We can postulate that the purpose of technology is conversion efficiency: the efficient conversion of any form of energy from Form A to Form B”). They also deftly ground the book in engineering history, with frequent references to such thinkers as R. Buckminster Fuller and concepts like Moore’s Law, explaining how familiar ideas will shape future developments. Although the volume focuses primarily on a descriptive approach to technological change, the authors do touch on the policy implications of the world they describe, particularly the need to accommodate workers displaced by automation and shifts in energy demand. The book presents an astute, realistic perspective on likely technological innovations—without treating the changes the authors anticipate as complete panaceas—acknowledging the complex web of tradeoffs that makes planning for the future a challenge. For instance, electric cars decrease gasoline consumption but add to demands on a power grid that relies on other fossil fuels. Readers will not walk away from the work with an absolute certainty about what will happen in the building and transportation industries in coming years, but they will feel well informed and prepared to discuss the implications of widespread technological change.
A solid and cleareyed look at developments in building, transportation, and energy technology.Pub Date: July 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73442-902-2
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Roger Duncan Consulting
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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