| TOO MUCH MAGIC Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation James Howard Kunstler New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, March 2012 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-8021-2030-4 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-8021-2030-X | 245pp. | HC | $25.00 | |
| Page 17: | "The American public is frustrated that the religion of progress can't seem to overcome the workings of entropy in this corner of the universe—although by and large although, Americans are not acquainted with the concept of entropy as such." |
| Extra word: S/B "although, by and large". |
| Page 30: | "It is perhaps from the trauma associated with these misfortunes that the behavior we associate with the ghetto had arisen, including..." |
| Verb tense: S/B "has arisen". |
| Page 31: | "There was light, air, birdsong, the chance to plant some flowers, grass for a dog run around on." |
| Missing word: S/B "dog to run around on". |
| Page 104: | "An internationalist by disposition, events allowed Bush One to ignore the Republican rural idiocy / family values agenda..." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "Events allowed Bush One, an internationalist by disposition, to ignore". |
| Page 107: | "...finance was based on symbols, certificates, and eventually by mere digital keystrokes." |
| Word choice: S/B "on mere digital". |
| Page 111: | "If you have money, you can pay for people to do things for you: [...] You can also buy materials for them to accomplish it with." |
| Number: S/B "to accomplish them with" (or better "with which to accomplish those things".) |
| Page 116: | "Psychologists have demonstrated that, in money matters, human beings are affected emotionally more so by losses than by gains." |
| Extra word: S/B "more by losses". |
| Page 131: | "Though government sponsored, the government did not explicitly backstop its holdings..." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "its holdings were not explicitly backstopped by the government". |
| Page 133: | "...impede Wall Street from profiting off financial so-called innovation." |
| Word choice: S/B "Wall Street's profiting from so-called financial innovation". |
| Page 133: | "This 'shadow banking' system would become a huge and dire threat to system." |
| Missing word: S/B "a huge and dire threat to the system". |
| Page 133: | "The United States imports 12 mm/b/d, more than two-thirds of our oil consumption." |
| Units: S/B "12m bbls/day". |
| Page 182: | "There is scant evidence that fracking operations conducted 5,000 or more feet underground has contaminated water tables..." |
| Number: S/B "have contaminated". |
| Page 182: | "...and nobody knows at this point how fracking operations on a massive scale might affect faults and fractures in strata above it over the long run." |
| Number: S/B "in strata above them". |
| Page 187: | "This sequence is largely what informs our understanding of what progress is, in a way that is, unfortunately self-reinforcing, so that we simply cannot imagine any other outcome..." |
| Missing comma: S/B "unfortunately, self-reinforcing". |
| Page 193: | "The U.S. government experimented exhaustively with thorium reactors in the 1960s and eventually closed down experimentation as unpromising." |
| Not exactly: it was a political decision. (Though thorium was unpromising in the sense that it would have delayed the buildout of (and the profits from) light-water reactors.) |
| Page 193: | "The competition that biofuels sets up with food crops..." |
| Number: S/B "biofuel sets up" or "biofuels set up". |
| Page 205: | "Milankovitch models posit a 100,000-year cycle and a 400,000-year cycle." |
| Incomplete: the Milankovitch cycles are 95,000, 41,000, and 22,000 years in length, while the shortest cycle (precession) varies from 19,000 to 26,000 years. In addition, these cycles interact so that longer-term changes result. There are still problems with Milankovitch Theory; some have to do with 100,000- and 400,000-year periods. |
| Page 209: | "So far, none of these projects have gone beyond the laboratory stage." |
| Number: S/B "has gone". |
| Pages 223-4: | "..a bottomless demand for simpleminded entertainments [...] which eventually drove truth and beauty in the arts so far underground that the sheer memory of it, let alone truth and beauty themselves, may be unrecoverable." |
| Number: S/B "the sheer memory of them". |
| Page 242: | "Then, he and his sidekick Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin bustled about on the surface..." |
| Aldrin officially changed his first name to "Buzz" in 1988. (Chaikin, Andrew, A Man on the Moon, p. 585) |
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