An urgent warning guaranteed to cause nightmares—and frustrating, since we’re all powerless in the face of nuclear weapons.
A scarifying, play-by-play exercise in gaming an apocalyptic war.
When the Cold War ended, military tacticians pronounced nuclear warfare a thing of the past. Instead, writes Jacobsen, author of The Pentagon’s Brain, Area 51, and Operation Paperclip, the threat of nuclear holocaust is ever with us. Her scenario—based, she notes, on facts that will lead readers “to the razor’s edge of what can legally be known”—begins with a single thermonuclear missile landing on the Pentagon, atomizing millions of Washingtonians far out into the distant suburbs. That scenario hinges on the gamed-out supposition that it will be a rogue North Korea that fires a single offending missile, one hard to detect given that the existing technology can track the heat signature of a “hot” missile and perhaps shoot it down if given a time frame of five minutes, after which, as one technician says, “they cannot see the rocket after the rocket motor stops.” Still worse is to come, for in a counterlaunch that would surely vaporize North Korea with overwhelming force, Russia, fearing that some of those American rockets are heading its way, might launch a retaliatory strike that would unleash every available resource in the arsenal of both nations—collectively capable of destroying humankind hundreds of times over. Updating Orville Schell’s groundbreaking (and better written) 1982 book The Fate of the Earth, Jacobsen then outlines the very rapid collapse of civilization and the erasure of all our technologies—no more electricity grid, no more industrially farmed food, certainly no more internet—all leading to a world in which “only the ruthless survive” and in which “everyone loses. Everyone.” It’s a cheerless prognosis; however, by Jacobsen’s account, it’s altogether plausible.
An urgent warning guaranteed to cause nightmares—and frustrating, since we’re all powerless in the face of nuclear weapons.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593476093
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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