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
A heartwarming and inspiring story for animal lovers.
The third volume in the Elephant Whisperer series.
In this follow-up to An Elephant in My Kitchen, Malby-Anthony continues her loving portrait of the Thula Thula wildlife reserve, which she co-founded in 1998 with her late husband, South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony, who published the first book in the series, The Elephant Whisperer, in 2009. Following his death in 2012, Malby-Anthony sought to honor his legacy by continuing his vision “to create a massive conservancy in Zululand, incorporating our land and other small farms and community land into one great big game park.” At the same time, the elephants gave her “a sense of purpose and direction.” In the Zulu language, thula means quiet, and though the author consistently seeks to provide that calm to her charges, peace and tranquility are not always easy to come by at Thula Thula. In this installment, Malby-Anthony discusses many of the challenges faced by her and her staff, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. These included an aggressive, 2-ton rhino named Thabo; the profound loss felt by all upon the death of their elephant matriarch, Frankie; difficulty obtaining permits and the related risk of having to relocate or cull some of their animals; the fear of looting and fire due to civil unrest in the region; and the ongoing and potentially deadly struggles with poachers. Throughout, the author also shares many warm, lighthearted moments, demonstrating the deep bond felt among the humans and animals at the reserve and the powerful effects of the kindness of strangers. “We are all working in unity for the greater good, for the betterment of Thula Thula and all our wildlife….We are humbled by the generosity and love, both from our guests and friends, and from strangers all around the world,” writes the author. “People’s open-hearted support kept us alive in the darkest times.”
A heartwarming and inspiring story for animal lovers.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781250284259
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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