A stellar account of a complex offshore world, as seen through the tangled history of a humble barge.
The weight of the world, carried by one lowly barge.
“Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.” Gustave Flaubert’s astute observation applies well to Kumekawa’s fascinating study of what might be perceived as a banal subject not worthy of our attention: a hulking barge. In 2020 the Harvard historian learned that “a simple ninety-four-meter-long flat-bottomed hull” had been moored on New York’s East River in the 1990s. Upon it sat five stories of modified shipping containers—it served as a floating jail. Curious to know more, Kumekawa found that the vessel had a complicated history that reflected, as he writes, “the abstract forces that have transformed our world over the past forty years.” It was built as the Balder Scapa in Sweden in 1979. Owned by a Norwegian tycoon, its first mission was as a transport barge, towed to Scotland with the “madcap idea” of dredging up steel from World War I warships that Germans sank rather than turn over to the British. That venture fizzled, and the barge was repurposed as a “floatel” to house North Sea offshore oil drillers. The Falklands War got in the way of that plan. In need of housing for troops in the South Atlantic, Margaret Thatcher’s government leased the barge in 1983. “Luxurious they were not,” one pilot said of the accommodations. The vessel’s next stop: Germany, for factory workers building the VW Beetle. And then it was off to New York as a jail, followed by time in England serving the same purpose. In 2010 it was towed to Nigeria for offshore oil workers. Throughout his epic telling, Kumekawa weaves in lucid and eye-opening explanations of the murky worlds of tax havens and loose regulations. The barge is at the heart of it all. The vessel has “no motor, no keel, no rudder,” he writes, but his book has undeniable drive.
A stellar account of a complex offshore world, as seen through the tangled history of a humble barge.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593801475
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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
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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