A thoroughly documented and thought-provoking book, certain to spark attention and discussion.
Hiding from the heat.
Excessive heat kills more people every year than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined. The solution to this international concern, says environmental journalist Bloch, is a simple one: more shade. But simple doesn’t mean easy. Putting even a small dent in the amount of heat absorbed by the earth involves a multinational commitment to complex changes in the way we design not only cities but also neighborhoods, public spaces, and homes. Bloch begins each chapter with a story capturing various ways that lack of shade affects segments of the world’s population, including passengers at bus stops in Los Angeles, travelers to desert oases, and residents of big-city high-rises, all seeking relief from the heat. The challenges are many: Homeowners want windows for light, property developers find it cheaper to rely on air conditioning to cool buildings, and city planners have a hard time justifying the cost of barriers and shade trees in public spaces. Ideas to reduce excessive heat range from planting trees to brightening clouds to solar-radiation management to using space shades and other tactics to reduce the amount of sunlight the earth absorbs. The simplest option is also the most obvious. As Bloch writes, “It’s understandable that Americans have forgotten how sweet shade can be. As air-conditioning has become the default method of cooling down, the shade tree has disappeared from the lexicon….There is still no technology known to man that cools the outdoors as effectively as a tree.” Bloch explores a catalog of possible solutions; none is examined in great depth, but the scope shows why this problem is not easily solved and presents an urgent need for continued conversation.
A thoroughly documented and thought-provoking book, certain to spark attention and discussion.Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780593242766
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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