Book Reviews

A review of Sunil Amrith, Unruly Waters:  How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia’s History (New York:  Penguin, 2020), 397 pp., maps, photos.      This sweeping history of India from the nineteenth century to the present focuses necessarily on agriculture, climate, and engineering.  Unlike the United States, where agriculture has not been dominant for a century, agriculture “employs 60 percent of India’s population,” and India’s “population will continue to be predominantly rural by the mid-twenty-first century” (p. 14).  Therefore, climate matters less in… Read More »Review of Unruly Waters by Sunil Amrith

A Review of Eugene Linden, Fire and Flood:  A People’s History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present (New York:  Penguin Press, 2022)      Eugene Linden’s Fire and Flood is a history of the problem of climate change over the last forty-odd years– must reading for members of CCL.  Linden captures the essence of developments decade by decade, the eighties, the nineties, and so forth, from four standpoints:  the reality of climate changes in the period, the scientists’ increasing understanding of them, public opinion… Read More »Review of Fire and Flood

Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works:  A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future (New York:  Viking, 2022), 326 pp.     Vaclav Smil, a member of the geography department at the University of Manitoba, in this well organized and clearly written book, argues that globalization and what he calls “the four material pillars of modern civilization,” plastics, steel, concrete, and ammonia, are central to understanding the problem of climate change.  The problem, simply put, is that all of them are carbon intensive.     … Read More »Review of Vaclav Smil book by Mark Neely

By Milton W. Cole Planet of the Humans is a controversial film that has received significant attention, in large part because its executive producer is Michael Moore, an iconoclastic film-maker and prominent leftist commentator. The film (temporarily available free on YouTube) is critical, indeed damning, of the environmental movement and especially its focus on climate change and the need for alternative renewable energy sources. The central question addressed by the film is this: does humankind really benefit from increased reliance on technologies that capture and… Read More »Movie Review: Planet of the Humans

A review of Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times (New York:  Pubic Affairs, 2019).  402 PP. No illus. Or maps.      The day I purchased Good Economics for Hard Times, I picked up the Wall Street Journal and read this front-page headline:  “Jobs Cap Decade of Steady Gains” (Jan. 11-12, 2020).       Steady jobs gains are not signs of “hard times.”  So does the fact that we now live in what may reasonably be thought of as easy times mean this book… Read More »Book review: What do do about economic growth