If no clear thesis or mandate about waste emerges, the collection of amazing factoids makes for entertaining reading.
An overview of waste in its myriad forms.
Every year, the total amount of gas spilled at the pump equals that of the Exxon Valdez disaster. The asteroid 16 Psyche, between Jupiter and Saturn, contains a variety of metals valued at around $700 quintillion. Online orders are returned 30% of the time. “Sixty percent of the world is still without indoor toilets, while Americans spend half a billion dollars a year on Halloween costumes…for their pets.” Such intriguing facts are thick on the ground in this collaboration between Reese, a tech entrepreneur, and Hoffman, a literary agent. As the authors write, waste is undesirable, incurs a net negative cost, and can be avoided; that definition is roomy enough to encompass water, plastic, gold, food, electricity, money, time, and human potential. “No one wants to waste,” they write, and many work hard to avoid it, “but the world is full of well-meaning attempts to avoid waste that actually cause more waste than they prevent.” Most of the book is lively and humorous, though the chapters on wasting energy and natural resources are more scientific than the rest. "If the planet's carbon system is generally in balance without human activity, why don't the 40 gigatons humans emit each year stay in the atmosphere—or [be] reabsorbed, the way naturally produced CO2 is?" Though the authors suggest that "astute readers" may be wondering this, some may have checked out already. The final section, "The Philosophy of Waste," considers more abstract quantities, creating an abrupt transition in a book that could have used a little more smoothing around the edges. Still, the anecdotes are often amusing. For example, a hedge fund manager once paid Kenny Rogers $4 million to play "The Gambler" over and over at a party. He was later convicted of fraud, fined, and imprisoned. "Evidently,” write the authors, “he knew neither when to walk away nor when to run."
If no clear thesis or mandate about waste emerges, the collection of amazing factoids makes for entertaining reading.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13518-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Currency
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2021
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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