An often insightful text with a fresh perspective that’s bogged down by disorganization and unnecessary detail.
Retired engineer Youssef aims to present “new ideas” in this discussion of climate change.
The author’s proposed ideas frame the debate as a worldwide issue. Youssef uses his experience living and working in Egypt, Canada, and the United States and numerous trips all over the world to interrogate the history and contemporary development of energy sources. He pays special attention to energy consumption differences in developed and developing countries, noting that some parts of the Middle East and Africa account for the least contributions to climate change but are the “most vulnerable to its impacts.” He highlights sources of energy, such as wood, that are still used in underserved communities, paying special attention to their health consequences. The book also calls for a renewed commitment by developed countries to create a united approach to addressing climate change, including supporting those countries that don’t have the economic wherewithal to make sweeping changes. Finally, the author states that climate change can’t be effectively mitigated without nuclear power, asserting that concerns about radiation and nuclear disaster are “exaggerated.” Overall, Youssef’s perspective is refreshing. Most debate surrounding climate change feels insular, highlighting individual responsibilities and quibbling over alternative energy sources; his global perspective reinvigorates larger issues at play. He also makes a special effort to address how industries can support displaced workers, how countries can accommodate building new facilities, and how the global community can support developing nations, thus preempting rebuttals that extreme changes would harm industry, the disenfranchised, and the underserved. However, his insights are undermined by meandering prose that spends too much time on finer details of how various energy sources work, their history, as well as usage, production, and export data. What results is a disorganized text that often loses track of its ideas. Furthermore, it uses data from sources with uncertain credibility, thereby muddying its assertions.
An often insightful text with a fresh perspective that’s bogged down by disorganization and unnecessary detail.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2023
ISBN: 978-0963242303
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Alpha Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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