In her first novel, Patricia Lockwood
“pulls off something unexpected,” said
Emily Bobrow in The Wall Street Journal.
Though it’s not a surprise that the Poet
Laureate of Twitter makes good use of
her social media fluency, she has also
found a way to successfully stitch light
comedy to “a moving portrait of love
and grief.” The unnamed protagonist
is, like Lockwood, a celebrated bard of
Twitter, and the book’s first half unfolds
in tweet-like fragments—many trafficking
in irony—as she travels the world speak-
ing about life online. Then she receives a
call in which she learns that her sister is
about to deliver a child whose health is
seriously compromised. From there on,
said Anthony Domestico in The Boston
Globe, our heroine “experiences love
and pain she couldn’t have conceived
of.” Though the jokiness never ceases,
“there are also, with increasing fre-
quency, passages of sublime emotional
power.” Lockwood, who showed her gift
for memoir with Priestdaddy, now dem-
onstrates what a great novel can do—
“habituate you to one mode of being
before bringing you to another.”(^24) ARTS
Review of reviews: Books
Bill Gates, the Mr. Fixit of mega- billionaires,
has just handed us a blueprint for how to
address “the most alarming crisis of all,”
said The Economist. Global warming,
the philanthropist and Microsoft founder
warns, poses an existential threat that
requires reducing annual global carbon
emissions to net zero by 2050. But How
to Avoid a Climate Disaster isn’t a scare
screed. Rather, “the most refreshing aspect
of this book is its bracing mix of cold-eyed
realism and number-crunched optimism.”
Today, the world produces 51 billion tons
of greenhouse gases, and Gates argues that
zeroing it out will require technological
innovation and breakthroughs that make
non carbon energy cheaper than fossil fuels.
He advocates quintupling R&D spending
to meet the 2050 goals—but points out
how modest such spending would still be.
“A respectful
biography of
the ideological
father of the
Confederacy may
feel as welcome
as an exhumed
corpse,” said
Andrew Delbanco
in The New York
Times. But John C.
Calhoun’s impact
on U.S. history
can’t be wished
away because he championed noxious
ideas, and Robert Elder’s lucid portrait of
the senator from antebellum South Carolina
helps us understand the full weight of the
man’s legacy. Calhoun’s stubborn inde-
pendence and fiery intelligence provided a
template for Moby-Dick’s Captain Ahab.
His staunch defense of slavery and advocacy
of its westward expansion helped ignite a
bloody civil war that began a decade after
his death. But even contemporaries who
loathed him esteemed his intellect. To this
day, thinkers on both the left and right lean
on Calhoun’s arguments about the rights of
political minorities.
Book of the week
Gates actually overestimates the true costs,
said Bill McKibben in The New York
Times. For a guy who has access to the
world’s finest experts, he’s “surprisingly
behind the curve on the geeky parts.”
Perhaps because he buys the fictions
pushed by the fossil-fuel industry, he seems
to have missed an “astonishing” drop in
the price of solar and wind power over the
past decade that will soon make it cheaper
to build solar and wind facilities than to
keep a coal- burning plant running. But
Gates also appears “curiously unaware of
or indifferent to” the arguments against
heavy investment in today’s green technol-
ogy, said Tilak Doshi in Forbes.com. At
one point, he dismisses a potential 20 per-
cent hike in energy costs for the average
consumer as “pretty affordable.” And
though he praises energy scholar Vaclav
Smil, he doesn’t mention Smil’s 2016 asser-
tion that to go fully renewable, the U.S.
would have to devote up to half its land to
wind and solar facilities.
Still, we need voices like Gates, said Ed
Conway in The Times (U.K.). His book
“does not hold all the answers,” and it
“reads at times like an investment prospec-
tus for some of the technologies in the cli-
mate field.” But unlike the climate-change
denialists on one side and the activists urg-
ing a total blackout on capitalism, Gates
“takes what is fast becoming the most
controversial of all paths: pragmatism.”
He understands that many countries can’t
lift people out of hunger and poor health
unless energy use in those places rises
rather than falls. “For those who wonder
whether there is a way of addressing cli-
mate change that doesn’t involve biblical
sacrifice and suffering, you could start by
reading this book.”
How to Avoid a Climate
Disaster: The Solutions We
Have and the Breakthroughs
We Need
by Bill Gates (Knopf, $27)
Novel of the week
No One Is Talking About This
by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead, $25)
Calhoun: American Heretic
by Robert Elder (Basic, $35)
“Calhoun often goes missing from Elder’s
early pages,” said Jonathan Horn in The
Wall Street Journal. Calhoun’s birth year,
1782, isn’t even mentioned before we learn
that this son of backcountry South Carolina
was schooled at Yale and arrived in
Congress at 29, eager to join the front line
in the young country’s battle of ideas. As
James Monroe’s secretary of war, Calhoun
helped build the Army that later defeated
the slave states, and he abandoned his own
White House ambitions only after serving
two terms as vice president. He resigned
that office to lead South Carolina’s bid to
nullify federal tariffs and thus establish the
preeminence of state sovereignty.
Calhoun was, in short, “the anti- Washington
of American history,” said Allen Guelzo in
The New Criterion. In his zeal to defend
slavery, he even argued on the Senate
floor that the Declaration of Independence
should never have included its “all men
are created equal” passage. Elder never
theatricalizes such moments, showing
an apparent aversion to “anything that
threatens to become exciting.” But as this
650-page book tracks the evolution of
Calhoun’s influential political philosophy, it
“never drags.” As he did in his own time,
“Calhoun stands as the intellectual spark to
disunion and civil war.”
Gates: A climate middle-grounder
AP