A rare book on engineering and its economics that will satisfy general readers.
A welcome new entry in the how-stuff-works genre.
Everyone knows that roads and bridges are pieces of infrastructure, but so are light switches, sewers, telephone poles, and mailboxes; this imaginative book tells us how they work and what they mean. Writing about her childhood, Chachra, a professor at Olin College of Engineering, chronicles how her middle-class family in urban India received running water for one hour, twice per day, which they collected in buckets for bathing and flushing toilets and boiled for drinking. Electrical brownouts were routine. The author delivers a fine education on the technology that provides a seamless life for the lucky “global 10 percent.” All infrastructure requires energy. The automobile, which speeds us from place to place in a metal shell, requires enormous energy to manufacture and transport to the local dealership, but flipping a light switch makes us no less a human-machine hybrid. Infrastructure is “vast and collective,” but it makes us free. Chachra criticizes the idea of “off the grid,” a life that would be dominated by maintaining personal systems to deal with water, electricity, heat, cleaning, and producing and cooking food. The author devotes the second half of this superbly rendered book to the ongoing problems of her subject. A company can profit by building a pipeline or bridge; legislators boast of promoting it; the media celebrate its opening. Thereafter, like all infrastructure, it requires ongoing maintenance, which is boring and expensive and—all experts agree—wildly inadequate. Due to aging pipe systems, “15% of all clean drinking water in the U.S. is lost to leaks.” Every decade or so, when a bridge collapses, we mourn the victims, but little changes. Turning to “plan for abundant energy and finite materials,” Chachra is more optimistic than most, noting that “we are not doomed to a dystopian future of failing systems.”
A rare book on engineering and its economics that will satisfy general readers.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780593086599
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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