Green-minded readers will learn much from Gonen’s investigations.
A sensible manifesto on behalf of recycling and other means of reducing waste.
Appointed New York City deputy commissioner for sanitation, recycling, and sustainability during the Bloomberg administration, Gonen is a longtime advocate of environmental restoration and protection with a sharp eye for practical tactics. As he learned in NYC, because corporations depend on taxpayer dollars to dispose of their waste, “a modern form of socialism” supporting ostensible champions of the free market, the public sector spends huge amounts of money on disposal that might better be used to upgrade infrastructure. Here, examining many corners of the economy, the author agitates for adopting “circular methods of production, distribution, consumption, and reuse of products and materials.” The pandemic provides a case in point: Gonen argues that the shortage of personal protective equipment could have been alleviated if single-use masks were not trashed but instead sterilized with a hydrogen peroxide mist. “Throwing away PPE,” he writes, “was a legacy of a horribly inefficient business model, not a medical requirement.” Throughout, the author examines the role of government for good and ill. He lauds the victory garden program and waste-reduction measures of the Depression era while noting that after World War II, federal programs “helped supercharge consumption” by making cheap credit easily available and pushing goods with planned obsolescence built into their DNA. Gonen also praises responsive industries—e.g., paper manufacturers, who, though likely glad that the paperless office has not come to pass, are taking care to plant two trees for every one felled and inventors who tinker with means to convert abundant materials, such as cow (and human) waste, into biogas. The author closes by urging businesses to adopt circular models if only as a selling point, since consumers are increasingly demanding environmental responsibility. Advocating a point without descending into mere rhetoric, the author ventures a well-reasoned case for changing our ways as producers and consumers.
Green-minded readers will learn much from Gonen’s investigations.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-19184-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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