The Publisher Says: Yes, the world faces substantial environmental challenges — climate change, pollution, and extinction. But the sRating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: Yes, the world faces substantial environmental challenges — climate change, pollution, and extinction. But the surprisingly good news is that we have solutions to these problems. In the past 50 years, a remarkable number of environmental problems have been solved, while substantial progress is ongoing on others.
The Optimistic Environmentalist chronicles these remarkable success stories. Endangered species — from bald eagles to gray whales — pulled back from the precipice of extinction. Thousands of new parks, protecting billions of hectares of land and water. The salvation of the ozone layer, vital to life on Earth. The exponential growth of renewable energy powered by wind, water, and sun. The race to be the greenest city in the world. Remarkable strides in cleaning up the air we breathe and the water we drink. The banning of dozens of the world’s most toxic chemicals. A circular economy where waste is a thing of the past. Past successes pave the way for even greater achievements in the future.
Providing a powerful antidote to environmental despair, this book inspires optimism, leading readers to take action and exemplifying how change can happen.
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My Review: Nine years on, this book hits different. We've just been through a truly horrifying US election, won by the lowest scum ever to win the world's most powerful political office; we can expect bad trouble to follow, on many fronts, soon.
That is going to require clear thinking and focused action. In its turn, that will require us to know where we are. The author presents his facts and draws very positive conclusions based on them.
No one can protect something they do not know the value, and the extent of. Learn! Don't despair...learn, and grown hardened to the messages of nihilism and misery and *shudder* change.
Protect our planet or we all go down together....more
The Publisher Says: In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digLonglisted for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award! Real Rating: 3.25* of five
The Publisher Says: In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new housing development, the last thing they expected to uncover was a human skeleton. Who the skeleton was and how it got buried there were just two of the long-held secrets that had been kept for decades by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side, sharing ambitions and sorrows.
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.
As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA MY FRIEND MARK. THANK YOU.
My Review: Quirky neighbors living in a supremely hardscrable era, gettin' by and gettin' along with the help and kindness they so generously give without expecting a return. Thus, of course, assuring they get one.
In other words, Norman Lear's wet dream. Author McBride can write his socks off. The lovely prose masks the sitcom-from-1972 plot. I expect to receive brickbats for breaking orthodoxy, but there it is....more
The Publisher Says: The lives of the working class in West Virginia—a train engineer, an epileptic, coal miners and outlaws, the fraRating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: The lives of the working class in West Virginia—a train engineer, an epileptic, coal miners and outlaws, the fragile and dispossessed—are explored in this powerful yet tender collection of six short stories and a novella. They depict an isolated world of hardship, human endurance, and hard-won dignity and are a lyrical rendering of times and places now largely gone—but the stirring clarity of people and landscape can persist in the reader's imagination.
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA LIBRARYTHING EARLY REVIEWERS. THANK YOU.
My Review: The novella "The Love of a Good Woman" reminds me of Flannery O'Connor's Southern Gothics. All of the stories are set in West Virginia, so should we call it "Appalachian Gothic" just to be clear? You're missing a trick if you don't procure one for yourself because it's rich, involving prose that tells really honest stories about people's real lives...love, family, the curdled joy of intimacy all get their inversions here. There's something very Lewis Nordan, in his Wolf Whistle mode, about the whole collection. Recommended....more
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