A surprisingly riveting look at the role of death, in life, as illustrated via a single element.
Illuminating the role of death in life.
“We have altered our connection with the earth,” warns science writer Jack Lohmann in his first book, about phosphorus, eons before industrial farming, and after it. Before industrial farming, the element—drawn from waste products like bat guano and carcass bones—was recycled locally by farmers. They used waste from their small farms to fertilize the wide variety of plants they fed their families. They instinctively understood their complex soils, which invariably hosted varieties of microorganisms ferrying life-giving (if immobile) phosphorus to plant roots. So they fertilized with complex local phosphorus mixtures and carefully turned soils over without crushing them (as modern machines do), leaving busy pockets of microbial life. Industrial farming changed all this. Agribusiness mined the earth for huge quantities of phosphate rocks, which made crops grow faster, but reduced both their own diversity and that of their nutrients. The result: farming that hasn’t solved world hunger, and excess phosphorus leaking into rivers and lakes, prompting excessive algae growth, hypoxia, and animal death (eutrophy) in most lakes of Eurasia and North America. Lohmann points out that, for millennia, hunter-gatherers did not die of chronic diseases. He suggests one reason may be their diets of local plants naturally fertilized with complex, recycled local waste. By comparison, for example, in agribusiness-dominated India, which uses massive amounts of mined phosphate fertilizer, half of all crops lack zinc; one-third lack boron, potentially contributing to weak skeletal and immune systems. Happily, worldwide, recognition of the urgent need to return to more balanced local farming practices is growing, Lohmann concludes. We are coming to see that “the soil functions as a living organism that preserves the world of a billion years ago while sustaining lives that will continue far into the future.”
A surprisingly riveting look at the role of death, in life, as illustrated via a single element.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593316610
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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