A provocative contribution to the energy debate.
Former U.S. Secretary of Energy Abraham advocates a new power-generation strategy for the next 20 years.
The author suggests that the United States derive its energy from a combination of sources, including nuclear energy, natural gas and coal gasification and hydroelectricity, solar power, wind power and other renewable sources. However, Abraham warns that competing priorities—increasing energy independence, maintaining low energy prices and the not-in-my-backyard syndrome, among others—combined with what he deems to be irrational fears about nuclear energy have prevented a competent approach to dealing with the problem of global warming: “The contradictions,” he writes, “always emerge to undermine any momentum we may establish.” Although bipartisan consensus has been at low ebb recently, Abraham attempts to bridge the gap. He remains a strong advocate for tapping off-shore oil reserves and opening the national parks for drilling, but he gives short shrift to the conservative claim that scientific evidence about global warming is a hoax. While he endorses solar and wind power as auxiliary energy sources, his central thesis focuses on the need to build more than 50 new nuclear plants in the next 20 years as a major component of a viable program for clean energy. A section on nuclear energy covers several crucial objections—reactor safety, terrorist attacks, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the problem of nuclear waste—and points to its advantage over solar and wind power because of its tremendous energy density: “2 million times greater than the energy releases from chemical reactions of fossil fuels.”
A provocative contribution to the energy debate.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-57021-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A declaration worth hearing out in a time of growing inequality—and indignity.
Noted number cruncher Sperling delivers an economist’s rejoinder to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Former director of the National Economic Council in the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the author has long taken a view of the dismal science that takes economic justice fully into account. Alongside all the metrics and estimates and reckonings of GDP, inflation, and the supply curve, he holds the great goal of economic policy to be the advancement of human dignity, a concept intangible enough to chase the econometricians away. Growth, the sacred mantra of most economic policy, “should never be considered an appropriate ultimate end goal” for it, he counsels. Though 4% is the magic number for annual growth to be considered healthy, it is healthy only if everyone is getting the benefits and not just the ultrawealthy who are making away with the spoils today. Defining dignity, admits Sperling, can be a kind of “I know it when I see it” problem, but it does not exist where people are a paycheck away from homelessness; the fact, however, that people widely share a view of indignity suggests the “intuitive universality” of its opposite. That said, the author identifies three qualifications, one of them the “ability to meaningfully participate in the economy with respect, not domination and humiliation.” Though these latter terms are also essentially unquantifiable, Sperling holds that this respect—lack of abuse, in another phrasing—can be obtained through a tight labor market and monetary and fiscal policy that pushes for full employment. In other words, where management needs to come looking for workers, workers are likely to be better treated than when the opposite holds. In still other words, writes the author, dignity is in part a function of “ ‘take this job and shove it’ power,” which is a power worth fighting for.
A declaration worth hearing out in a time of growing inequality—and indignity.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7987-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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