literarysara's Reviews (45)

 I inhaled this book, which was darkly satirical and so much fun to read. It centers on the Rubin Institute, a neoliberal fever dream of a university where disgraced public figures are exiled after being fired for saying or doing something unforgivable in the public eye. Helen is a brilliant physics grad student and her mentor is an irreplaceable genius; they believe themselves close to making a breakthrough that would decelerate climate change, so when her mentor is invited to Rubin after sleeping with another graduate student, Helen feels compelled to go with him. Life at Rubin is pretty plush, the sort of palace a billionaire might design for his pleasure when he is ejected from polite society: there are parties, expensive food, unlimited resources and amenities, no rules. Reading about it is great fun--most of the institute exists within a phallic tower called, hilariously, "The Endowment"--but living there brings Helen and her husband to the brink. 

 I got interested in road ecology during my field trips last summer, so of course I eagerly anticipated this book. Its topics were more wide-ranging than I expected–there was a chapter I loved on benefits and challenges of planting milkweed by roadsides to provide food and habitat to monarch butterflies, but there were also chapters on the history of Americas roads, a great many chapters about roadkill and various mitigation strategies such as wildlife crossings, and some tantalizing trivia about noise pollution and necrophages. It was a serendipitous read for this month, when my volunteer group has been doing water testing to check chloride levels in waterways before and after snowfall and road salting. I wrote a little about it for our newsletter, and learned that the amount of salt we use on roads in the US has doubled since the 1970s. That’s partly because there are more roads, but also because the roads are open all the time and there is the expectation that snow and ice won’t slow down travel or commerce. That’s what’s interesting to me… the ways in which we treat a road as a right and a fact, while we consider environmental phenomena like snow and animal migrations to be inconveniences (if we consider them at all). I did really appreciate this book and do recommend it, although I also complained to friends about the writing style (a little contrived, especially in the beginning, or perhaps I just got used to it).