More solid work from a fire expert.
In a world on fire—literally and figuratively—a scholar revisits and reinforces the science behind the conflagrations.
Both the scientific world and professionals who work in forestry management view Pyne’s seminal Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (1991) as something between a road map for preventing future disasters and a work of poetry. This follow-up is a hybrid of sorts, adding a new preface and epilogue to a previous sequel with the same title but also including contemporary context to the concepts that were reiterated in the 2006 edition. It’s impressive that Pyne, an American scholar at Arizona State, commands such respect when it comes to the problem of Australian bush fires, but the ideas and context that he revisits here form the basis for strategies that are actionable across regions. The author also acknowledges that no geographic area can be addressed with a single method of containment. As in his previous works, Pyne’s primary totem is the “firestick,” the method of creating fire since prehistoric times that has become an instrument of both power and destruction, which often travel hand in hand. “Fire will happen, with or without people,” he writes. “But what people do with fire speaks volumes about how they live on the land, and what they do to reconcile those firesticks says much about how they live with each other.” The book covers a wide variety of subjects, from the history of humanity’s experience with fire and subsequent wildfires to the complicated philosophies involved in forest management, fire conservancy, environmentalism, and politics. Pyne’s insights remain sound, and he provides a few new ones, as well—e.g., the fact that the spread and intensification of industrial combustion is “the new prime mover of fire on Earth.” Fire is both a gift and a curse for the human race; how we choose to face it can mean all the difference.
More solid work from a fire expert.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-950354-48-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Scribe
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
For fans only.
The hoodie-and-shorts-clad Pennsylvania senator blends the political and personal, and often not nicely.
Fetterman’s memoir addresses three major themes. The first—and the one he leads with—is depression and mental illness, which, combined with a stroke and heart trouble, brought him to a standstill and led him to contemplate suicide. The second is his rise to national-level politics from a Rust Belt town; as he writes, he’s carved a path as a contentious player with a populist streak and a dislike for elites. There are affecting moments in his personal reminiscences, especially when he writes of the lives of his working-class neighbors in impoverished southwestern Pennsylvania, its once-prosperous Monongahela River Valley “the most heartbreaking drive in the United States.” It’s the third element that’s problematic, and that’s his in-the-trenches account of daily politics. One frequent complaint is the media, as when he writes of one incident, “I am not the first public figure to get fucked by a reporter, and I won’t be the last. What was eye-opening was the window it gave into how people with disabilities navigate a world that doesn’t give a shit.” He reserves special disdain for his Senate race opponent Mehmet Oz, about whom he wonders, “If I had run against any other candidate…would I have lost? He got beaten by a guy recovering from a stroke.” Perhaps so, and Democratic stalwarts will likely be dismayed at his apparent warmish feelings for Donald Trump and dislike of his own party’s “performative protests.” If Fetterman’s book convinces a troubled soul to seek help, it will have done some good, but it’s hard to imagine that it will make much of an impression in the self-help literature. One wonders, meanwhile, at sentiments such as this: “If men are forced to choose between picking their party or keeping their balls, most men are going to choose their balls.”
For fans only.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593799826
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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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