Featured Book Lists
Abundance
by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
Publishers Weekly (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved 9781668023488 In this probing treatise, New York Times columnist Klein (Why We’re Polarized) and Atlantic staff writer Thompson (Hit Makers) explore the legislative bottlenecks hampering progress on housing, infrastructure, and clean energy, among other pressing issues. Zooming in on San Francisco to explore the nation’s housing crisis, the authors explain how onerous zoning restrictions limiting the number of units developers can build per lot constrain housing supply growth, while a law requiring the government to prioritize small businesses when granting contracts means developers must wait until one of the few qualifying companies has availability. Effective governance necessitates cutting through red tape when it proves overly prohibitive, Klein and Thompson contend, citing how Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro restored a collapsed section of I-95 in 12 days, instead of the many months initially expected, by issuing a declaration of emergency that enabled the state to waive such time-consuming requirements as a bidding process and environmental impact statement. Elsewhere, the authors lament how caps on H-1B visas are limiting immigration of the highly skilled foreign scientists and mathematicians who have historically helped drive American innovation. Klein and Thompson are, by their own admission, more interested in diagnosing problems than outlining solutions, and while this feels like a bit of a cop-out, the remarkably unstuffy discussions offer as lucid an explanation of contemporary legislative quandaries as readers are likely to find. Policy wonks will rejoice. (Mar.)
Kirkus Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission. 9781668023488 Helping liberals get out of their own way. Klein, aNew York Times columnist, and Thompson, anAtlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful. Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Bleeding Edge
by Thomas Pynchon
Book list From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission. 9781594204234 *Starred Review* Pynchon's debut novel, V., appeared 50 years ago, and ever since he's been tracking dubious covert actions and the arc and consequences of technology in novels of labyrinthine complexity, impish wit, and open-armed compassion. Of late, his inquiry has taken the form of rambunctious and penetrating crime novels. Inherent Vice (2009), currently being adapted for film, is set in 1960s Los Angeles and features a pothead PI and the launch of the digital revolution. In his latest, a hilarious, shrewd, and disquieting metaphysical mystery, Pynchon expresses love for New York City and leeriness of the seemingly boundless reach of the Internet. In spring 2001, the dot-com bubble has burst and 9/11 looms. Maxine Tarnow, a fraud investigator gone rogue, is unflappable, wise-cracking, Beretta-toting, and Jewish. Devoted to her young sons, she is embroiled in an amorphous case involving a sinister techie billionaire, diverted funds, Islamic terrorists, hip-hop-spouting Russian gangsters, a black-ops agent, a cosmic bike messenger, and a Deep Web virtual reality. Fearless, caustic, lightning-witted Maxine (sister to characters created by Sara Paretsky and Cynthia Ozick) instigates some of the funniest banter ever scripted. But amid the sharp hilarity of this exuberantly maze-like, pop-culture-peppered, deeply informed tale, Pynchon incisively and cuttingly broaches unanswered questions surrounding the tragedy of 9/11 and elucidates just how profoundly life has changed in its wake. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Pynchon is a magnet for media attention and reader fervency, and this New York mystery will exert a powerful pull.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal (c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. 9781594204234 Once again, Pynchon delivers an -extraordinary sense of the zeitgeist. As the book opens, Maxine Tarnow-sort of separated from staid Horst-gets her sons off to school in an artfully rendered Upper West Side directly before 9/11. A fraud investigator who's lost her license, which makes for scuzzy clients but lets her pack a Beretta, Maxine is on the case when filmmaker friend Reg contacts her about his suspicions regarding hashslingrz, the computer security firm he's been asked to document. Maxine's investigations lead her to hashslingrz monomaniac Gabriel Ice; Igor, a Russian mafioso with a conscience; and two rap-spouting sidekicks named Misha and Grisha; government agent Windust, a murderer and torturer with whom Maxine exchanges information and a carnal moment; and many more. Then there's friend Vyrva, whose husband has helped create the virtual escape site DeepArcher, emblem of the turn-of-the-21st-century techno-angst, -greed, and -possibility that is the book's thematic context. VERDICT A theory is voiced here about CIA involvement in 9/11 to get funding from anti-Islamic sources. But 9/11 is not ultimately the point. Nor is Maxine's page-turning, occasionally dense, high art-low art mystery trail. What matters is the creation of a time, a place, and authentic, deeply connected characters, all heightened by Pynchon's darkly hilarious way with language and located on the "bleeding edge" as the world changed. [See Prepub Alert, 5/6/13.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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