Good history and science, if short on optimism.
Their central role in American life and history.
Preszler, professor of practice at Cornell University and director of the Henry David Thoreau Foundation’s Planetary Solutions Initiative, opens with a paean to Christmas trees. Introduced by 19th-century German immigrants, they’ve become a symbol of peace and goodwill for the religious and unreligious alike. They’re also disappearing. Since realistic plastic models appeared in the 1980s, 75% of U.S. households have switched. Having absorbed this news, readers will proceed to learn that the first genuine bonanza discovered by 17th-century Europeans in North America was not gold or freedom but trees. Most will be surprised to read that pilgrim voyages to Massachusetts were financed by British timber merchants who expected to be paid back in their product. England’s forests had been logged past recovery, and the Royal Navy hated importing its masts from the Baltic. Of the miseries endured by these pious pioneers, cutting and hauling trees remained prominent. In fact, Preszler maintains that lumber was the nation’s largest industry for several centuries. “Timber framed the nation, both figuratively and literally, bankrolling America’s rapid expansion at devastating human cost.” There follows a painful account of the destruction of Eastern forests for construction as well as farming, followed by the massacre of Western pines and firs and 95% of sequoias. The author ends with another chapter on Christmas trees—the operation of a tree farm, a grueling hands-on enterprise to ensure production, after seven to 10 years, of a beautiful, fragrant, symmetrical product that keeps its needles until the New Year. Profits are slim, and most go to the retailer. An irony is that holiday evergreens, today mostly an agricultural product no less than apples, are portrayed as environmentally irresponsible, although artificial trees end up in landfills with their plastic spreading across continents and oceans and into our bodies.
Good history and science, if short on optimism.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781643756707
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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