Publishers Weekly - November 10, 2014

book a great primer for readers who are just getting started in their reading on the subject, and it includes a foreword by astronomer (and Queen guitarist) Dr.

Brian May. Like The Sky at Night, this chatty, non-technical discussion is perfect for the armchair or budding astronomer who wants a bit of background and history spread widely across the field. (Jan.)

The Purpose Principles: How to
Draw More Meaning into Your Life

Jake Ducey. Penguin/Tarcher, $14.95 (256p)

ISBN 978-0-399-17264-9

Public speaker Ducey (Into the Wind) gives an enthusiastic but overly familiar book-length pep talk about the importance of leading a purpose-driven life. He encourages risk-taking over being “smart, safe, and comfortable,” declaring that readers should place more value on the process of working towards goals than on their actual achievement.

Though Ducey also endorses nonconformity, he draws rather heavily from his mentor, Jack Canfield, author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, providing bland platitudes like “Think your purpose” and “Do what you love and success will come.” Political diatribes about “the corporate agenda,” government corruption, and his detainment after a protest against the Keystone Pipeline, meanwhile, feel shoehorned in.

He does have a winning collection of inspiring stories from celebrities and historical figures, including Jackie Robinson’s brave stance against racism, Sylvester Stallone’s uncompromising attitude in his early career, and J.K.

Rowling’s perseverance during her pre– Harry Potter life. Ducey’s message is simple—goals are best achieved through active pursuit—yet his scope is so wide that the material feels unfocused. Agent: Bill Gladstone, Waterside Productions.

(Jan.)

The Radical King

Martin Luther King Jr. Edited and introduced by Cornel West. Beacon, $26.95 (312p) ISBN 978-0-8070-1282-6

This selection of King’s writings and
speeches ably introduces historical
neophytes to the great civil rights leader’s
“radical” side, though readers may feel a
disconnect between his empathetic words
nation’s public employee unions. “The
conflict between the interests of govern-
ment unions and the public interest is
profound,” he begins. Starting with the
Boston police strike of 1919, DiSalvo
examines the growth of unionized govern-
ment. He identifies 2009 as a pivot point:
the first year in which more public than
private employees in the U.S. belonged to
unions. “Public sector unions are funda-
mentally political entities,” he argues. The
book convincingly portrays government
workers as aggressive political players
capable of engineering the elections of the
legislators who in theory are their manag-
ers. According to DiSalvo, the result is
that budgetary havoc, me-first protec-
tions, and reduced productivity become
the order of the day. He puts particular
focus on the union contracts for public
school teachers, emphasizing cases in
which these agreements have shielded
gross incompetence. Acknowledging pro-
union arguments, this scholarly analysis
also explains why expensive pensions and
benefits for teachers, police, firefighters,
and corrections officers continue to be
popular. DiSalvo sometimes gets lost in
academic hair-splitting and conflicting
data, but readers of any political persua-
sion should be sobered by his observation
that democratic government’s inevitable
fate seems to be “spending more, getting
less.” (Jan.)

How to Read the Solar System:
A Guide to the Stars and Planets

Chris North and Paul Abel. Pegasus, $26.95

(320p) ISBN 978-1-60598-671-5

North and Abel, hosts of the BBC’s popular astronomy TV series, The Sky at Night, step into print with this highly accessible introduction to basic astronomy.

The authors open with a romp through
the history of the field, from the earliest
recorded celestial observations, made in
Bronze Age China, through the discover-
ies of the ancient Greeks, to the work of
Renaissance scientists such as Copernicus,
Kepler, and Galileo. The sun and planets
of our solar system each receive individual
attention (though Uranus and Neptune
share a chapter), and subsequent sections
offer brief introductions to asteroids, the
Kuiper Belt, comets, and the ongoing
search for exoplanets. The authors compre-
hensively cover all the basics, making this
Critical close reading” to FBI agents
required to practice an unlikely kind of
literary criticism in the pursuit of
“subversives.” Scholars will find this
densely written work a powerful take on
African-American literature. Maxwell’s
passion for the subject spills onto every
page of his detailed, persuasive documen-
tation that “the FBI [was] an institution
tightly knit (not consensually) to African-
American literature.” (Jan.)

Four Fields

Tim Dee. Counterpoint (PGW, dist.), $25 (264p) ISBN 978-1-61902-461-8

In the grand nature-writing tradition of examining the ways humanity and the land change one another—how we are both intimately part of our environment and profoundly separate—bird-watching explorer Dee (A Year on the Wing: Journeys with Birds in Flight) focuses on open fields around the world. Dee describes fields as “the most articulate description and vivid enactment of our life here on earth, of how we live both within the grain of the world and against it”: spaces as ephemeral and hardy as grass. His explorations alternate among Kenya’s hoof-trampled Masai Mara; the prairie battlefield of Little Bighorn, Mont.; an Exclusion Zone full of mutated animals at Chernobyl, Ukraine; and the seasonal changes of the fens near his home in England. Dee interlaces careful descriptions of his experience of being in these spaces with the human history that turned these lands to agricultural use and then permitted nature to reclaim them, winding lyrical stories of the interaction between person and place, history and physicality. Equally at ease with people, birds, and old guidebooks, Dee tells the story of the world’s survival, with us and despite us, urging us to see our deep influence on the world we have created, and to credit it for much of what we are. (Jan.)