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
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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