Thoughtfully sounds an alarm, though not as loudly as it perhaps could.
A sobering glimpse into China’s environmental degradation, matched with stirring photography of what’s threatened.
China’s rapid economic expansion in the past two decades has come at a cost. Air pollution in its major cities is ghastly, the building of dams has caused deadly floods, wetlands are disappearing, and deforestation has widened deserts in the center of the country. In short, China is a harrowing exemplar of the dangers of man-made climate change, though in writing about his travels, photographer Gallagher avoids heated rhetoric. His tone is generally cool as he writes about the diminishing fish stocks and erosion at a large but shrinking freshwater lake, semisuccessful efforts to save crocodiles and heavy bamboo cultivation, only lightly narrating his travels from his perspective. (A truck breakdown in the middle of the desert is as dramatic as the book gets.) Still, Gallagher’s photography is as vibrant as his prose is plainspoken. The book features dozens of images of colorful Tibetan prayer flags, algae-thick ponds, desolate and sand-strewn roadways, and endangered pandas. Much of the book is designed to provide teaching moments for photojournalists: Each of the four main chapters includes a virtual contact sheet of his images, with brief interactive commentaries about composition, and Gallagher also includes a few experiments with more low-resolution Instagram shots. Eight videos of about five minutes each, also shot by Gallagher, bolster the points made in the chapters, though they animate the story only slightly. He tends to favor lingering shots of landscapes and avoid portraiture. The overall feel of the interactive e-book is that of an effective if somewhat flat piece of extended newspaper reportage, and there’s an interesting but odd irony in that Gallagher’s rich photography is so rich and well-composed that the fragile environment he’s captured looks consistently beautiful.
Thoughtfully sounds an alarm, though not as loudly as it perhaps could.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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