Review by Choice Review
While it is a given that early modern Spanish Catholicism promoted and justified conquest, Conover (Augustana Univ.) eschews the denunciation of missionaries who ran roughshod over indigenous culture to focus instead on how Catholicism and, in particular, the cult of local saints promoted loyalty to imperial policies. The author centers his analysis on San Felipe de Jesus, an almost accidental saint, whose life connects Spain to Mexico, the Philippines, Japan, and Rome. Appropriated as a son of Mexico City, this saint, who performed no miracles, provides an apt foil to the much better known Virgin of Guadalupe. Highlighting the political significance of inserting local saints into the liturgical calendar, the author describes the emergence of the cult of Catholic saints in Mexico during the Habsburg period, then traces transformations under the Bourbons, and the enduring significance of Catholic saints during New Spain's transition to the independent nation of Mexico. A global perspective strengthens the book's appeal. The new prism through which Conover views Mexican history makes this volume an important source for graduate students and for established scholars. Its tight organization and lucid argument make it accessible to undergraduates. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Joan Meznar, Eastern Connecticut State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH: Life After Warming, by David Wallace-Wells. (Tim Duggan, $27.) Wallace-Wells 0ffers a remorseless, near-unbearable account of anthropomorphic climate change, "the biggest threat human life on the planet has ever faced," and lays out · what it will take to avoid catastrophe. LOSING EARTH: A Climate History, by Nathaniel Rich. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Rich posits that "nearly every conversation we have in 2019 about climate change was being held in 1979." This history details the paths not taken and the warnings ignored as the threat of global warming increased over the course of those four decades of inaction. GREEK TO ME: Adventures of the Comma Queen, by Mary Norris. (Norton, $25.95.) Norris, a longtime copy editor at The New Yorker whose first book chronicled her passion for punctuation, here recounts, with the same contagious wit and enthusiasm, her obsession with Greece - its language, history and culture. WHAT BLEST GENIUS? The Jubilee That Made Shakespeare, by Andrew McConnell Stott. (Norton, $26.95.) In 1769 the great British actor David Garrick held a three-day extravaganza to celebrate Shakespeare and advance his own career. This lively book captures the poor planning, incessant rain and ensuing chaos. AMERICAN MESSIAHS: False Prophets of a Damned Nation, by Adam Morris. (Norton, $28.95.) The religious history of America is filled with cults and marginal sectarian communities. Morris fills in the fascinating details, with a focus on the charismatic prophets who dissented from traditional Christianity - and claimed, in one way or another, to represent God directly. STONY THE ROAD: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Penguin Press, $30.) This lucid and essential history - bolstered by a wealth of visual material - traces the rise of white supremacy in the wake of the Civil War. WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD IS TRUE: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, by Carolyn Forché. (Penguin Press, $28.) As a young poet in the 1970s, Forché accompanied a stranger to El Salvador and found a country on the edge of civil war. This luminous memoir records her self-discovery and political awakening. MAGICAL NEGRO: Poems, by Morgan Parker. (Tin House, paper, $15.95.) Parker's tense, funny collection, her third, explores the gap between black experience and the white imagination's version of it, further proving her considerable skill and consequence. DOOMSTEAD DAYS, by Brian Teare. (Nightboat, paper, $17.95.) Teare's latest volume, composed largely while walking, addresses climate change, apocalypse and grief in poems that feel solitary but intimate. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 12, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Rich, a novelist (King Zeno, 2018) and journalist, turns his widely discussed 2018 investigation for the New York Times Magazine into an exceedingly well-written history of the early political battles over addressing climate change. This is, in fact, a must-read handbook for everyone concerned about our planet's future. Readers will gain invaluable insights from Rich's exemplary reportage, and he also provides a road map for avoiding past missteps. This meticulous account of myriad missed opportunities to do the right thing for the environment and humanity over the past four decades is truly galling. Rich shows how political weakness, unfounded economic fear, and relentless preference for willful ignorance over thoughtful action dominated the approach to the threat of global warming during the 1980s. He tracks the birth of climate denialism and addresses how and why the fossil-fuel industry turned against science, and politicians went along with it. Nearly every conversation that we have in 2019 about climate change was being held in 1979, he writes. By taking readers into the meetings and among the players, Rich shines a necessary light on the predominant issue of our time. Losing Earth is eloquent, devastating, and crucial.--Colleen Mondor Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The time to have averted worldwide climate change was long agoand scientists knew that very fact a long time ago as well.As New York Times Magazine writer at large Rich (King Zeno, 2017, etc.) notes at the beginning, "nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979." Indeed, that understanding was largely unclouded by oppositional politics in a time when the president was not proud to proclaim that he was too smart to believe in climate change. The scientific consensus, then as now, was that human activities had altered the environment; the question was what could be done about it. Today, Rich notes, the odds of doing anything meaningful to slow climate change to an overall average warming of "only" 2 degrees Celsius are slimabout one in 20, he reckons, and even that will mean the extinction of coral reefs, rising sea levels, coastal flooding, and a host of other woes. Rich charts that 1979 terminus to a government study of coal emissions, which, if allowed to continue unmodified, would result in "significant and damaging" changes in the atmosphere. Other federal reports of the period were just as presciente.g., one that "warned that humanity's fossil fuel habit would lead inexorably to a host of intolerable' and irreversible' disasters" while recommending the transition to renewal energy sources. Big money buried these findings, along with a leadership that was reluctant to "change the national model of energy production" and, indeed, the world economy. By Ronald Reagan's time, the reluctance became intransigence. By the time of George W. Bush, business and government leaders had "consolidated behind the position that the benefits of emissions cuts should be weighed against immediate economic costs." By today, Rich warns, "the distant perils of climate change are no longer very distant"and they grow closer every day.A maddening book full of what-ifs and the haunting suspicion that if treated as a political problem and not as a matter of life and death, climate change will cook everyone's geese. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.