An informative, purposeful argument about why we must accept the moral as well as practical responsibility of water...
Why well-functioning natural ecosystems—“watersheds, wetlands, floodplains, and river systems”—play as important a role in our economic infrastructure as dams, canals, and water treatment plants.
While recognizing the benefits of “large-scale water engineering” projects that support an increasing population at a higher standard of living, Global Water Policy Project director Postel (Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle Last?, 1999, etc.) questions whether this dependence on man-made structures is sustainable. Over the past two centuries, argues the author, the massive benefits have tended to overshadow hidden costs such as the depletion of groundwater and unsustainable water use. “As long as progress was measured by the growth in populations served, hectares irrigated, and kilowatt-house generated,” she writes, “the construction of big dams, canals, turbines, and pumps was deemed to serve humanity well.” We have substituted filtration plants for wetlands, which provided purification by natural filtration, in order to supply water to support farms and urban development. Another important concern is the extent to which we are depleting groundwater for irrigation. Postel cites a particularly alarming example: the Chinese irrigation project involving the transfer of “a volume of water equal to the yearly flow of the Nile River” from the Yangtze River, at an estimated cost of $60 billion, without regard to the ecological and social disruptions involved. Nevertheless, the author is optimistic about a shift away from a narrow, utilitarian view of water to a recognition that it is “the planet’s greatest gift.” She is discovering a growing appreciation for the important role of natural ecosystems; hopefully, she writes, the efforts to recharge groundwater in California—and other Western states—by replenishing aquifers will succeed in alleviating the immediate threat of drought and provide a model for future water management.
An informative, purposeful argument about why we must accept the moral as well as practical responsibility of water stewardship.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61091-790-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Island Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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