By Rory Nugent. Top 10 Books on the Environment Feb. 2009....
3
February 15, 2009 Booklist 25 www.booklistonline.com T he first lesson in Ecology 101 is that everything is connected. is means that a book about bees relates strongly to books about ranching, a river in New York, a Wisconsin prairie, and Los Angeles’ smog. e best “green” books reviewed in Booklist over the past year take distinctive perspectives on the same matrix of forces human and wild, explicating problems, offering solutions, and telling compelling stories of hubris and hope. —Donna Seaman Albatross: eir World, eir Ways. By Tuie De Roy and others. 2008. Firefly, $49.95 (9781554074150). In this magnificent book about a magnificent bird—the revered, now endangered albatross—wildlife photographer De Roy and contributing scientists cover all aspects of albatross beauty, biology, and conservation. American Earth: Environmental Writing since oreau. Ed. by Bill McKibben. 2008. Library of America, $40 (9781598530209). e environmental movement has been guided by writing of clarity and power, including books by McKibben, who has created a defining and essential anthology featuring 100 pioneering, eco-minded writers. Fruitless Fall: e Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis. By Rowan Jacobsen. 2008. Bloomsbury, $25 (9781596915374). Jacobsen celebrates the marvels of the honeybee, reveals the many ways we’ve en- dangered this essential pollinator, and calls for action to prevent a “fruitless fall.” Greasy Rider: Two Dudes, One Fry-Oil-Powered Car, and a Cross-Country Search for a Greener Future. By Greg Melville. 2008. Algonquin, paper, $15.95 (9781565125957). Melville’s larky tale of a coast-to-coast road trip in a car running on french-fry oil, including stops at a wind farm, a renewable energy lab, and a green home, is splen- didly entertaining and educational. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America. By omas L. Friedman. 2008. Farrar, $27.95 (9780374166854). Friedman makes the all-important connection between business and environmen- talism in this call for a green revolution. e Hudson: America’s River. By Frances F. Dunwell. 2008. Columbia Univ., $74.50 (9780231136402); paper, $29.95 (9780231136419). e beautiful and historic Hudson River became “grossly polluted,” a story with a happy and instructive ending brilliantly told by Dunwell, a key figure in the river’s restoration. Nature’s Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm. By Steven I. Apfelbaum. 2009. Beacon, $25.95 (9780807085820). Ecologist Apfelbaum candidly chronicles the complex challenges he faced while re- storing an 80-acre swath of woefully depleted and toxic southern Wisconsin farmland and turning it back into a thriving prairie. Smogtown: e Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles. By Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly. 2008. Overlook, $26.95 (9781585678600). A fun book about smog? Jacobs and Kelly capture the aura of 1950s sci-fi movies in this lively history of Los Angeles’ monstrous smog. Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land. By Amy Irvine. 2008. Farrar/ North Point, $25 (0-86547-703-5). Drawing on her Mormon family history, Irvine revels in Utah’s breathtaking beauty and protests its destructive exploitation. Why I Came West. By Rick Bass. 2008. Houghton, $24 (9780618596751). Bass tracks his ardor for the wild, especially his love for Montana’s Yaak Valley, in this moving and instructive memoir of his life as a writer and wilderness activist. Top 10 Books on the Environment Down at the Docks. By Rory Nugent. Feb. 2009. 304p. Pantheon, $24.95 (9780375420641). 974.4. Nugent, a sailor and a rambunctious travel writer, lived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, for 17 years, collecting the edgy stories that fuel this transfixing portrait of a vanishing world. Writing with the brio, precision, and wry wit of the king of narrative nonfiction, Joseph Mitchell, and sharing Mitchell’s em- pathy for those who live outside the cage of rules, laws, and common sense, Nugent anchors the tempestuous “riches to rags” history of New Bedford to a motley crew of waterfront denizens, capturing the cur- rents of their voices and the storminess of their makeshift lives as fisheries are wiped out. ere’s mechanic Mako and fixer Pink. Stoic Marie and tough Fatima, proprietors of a dockside café and descendants of a long line of Portuguese fishermen, and Sword, a Vietnam vet, junkie, and fisherman by way of the town’s defunct textile miles. Piracy, drugs, embezzlement, black markets––New Bedford’s criminality thrives while marine life collapses, taking the town’s once-golden fishing culture with it. Nugent’s electrifying rogue’s gallery reveals the deep truth about humankind’s reliance on and abuse of na- ture. —Donna Seaman Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution. By Auden Schendler. Mar. 2009. 304p. PublicAffairs, $26.95 (9781586486372). 333.79. Kermit the Frog said it best: “It’s not easy being green.” If it were, amends Schendler, we’d already be doing it—as he has been, and in the most unlikely of places. As di- rector of Community and Environmental Responsibility for the Aspen Skiing Compa- ny, Schendler was challenged with bringing green practices to a place where the clientele were more interested in the sustainability of their perfect tans than of the planet. e concept of renewable energy and the reality of climate change were anathema to a hos- pitality corporation that spared no expense when it came to guest comfort; even com- pact fluorescent bulbs were a hard sell. But if the paradigm can be shifted in Aspen, it can be changed in Altoona. Frankly chroni- cling how an internationally renowned resort found both innovative and pragmatic ways to make recycling, biofuels, and other earth- friendly applications profitable, Schendler frames his environmentally sound arguments in practical terms every business executive, home owner, and government official can re- late to. —Carol Haggas Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers. By Laura Pritchett. May 2009. 240p. illus. Univ. of Oklahoma, paper, $19.95 (9780806140131). 363.72. When readers are weary or leery of
Transcript of By Rory Nugent. Top 10 Books on the Environment Feb. 2009....
February 15, 2009 Booklist 25www.booklistonline.com
The first lesson in Ecology 101 is that everything is connected. This means that a book about bees relates strongly to books
about ranching, a river in New York, a Wisconsin prairie, and Los Angeles’ smog. The best “green” books reviewed in Booklist over the past year take distinctive perspectives on the same matrix of forces human and wild, explicating problems, offering solutions, and telling compelling stories of hubris and hope. —Donna Seaman
Albatross: Their World, Their Ways. By Tuie De Roy and others. 2008. Firefly, $49.95 (9781554074150).
In this magnificent book about a magnificent bird—the revered, now endangered albatross—wildlife photographer De Roy and contributing scientists cover all aspects of albatross beauty, biology, and conservation.
American Earth: Environmental Writing since Thoreau. Ed. by Bill McKibben. 2008. Library of America, $40 (9781598530209).
The environmental movement has been guided by writing of clarity and power, including books by McKibben, who has created a defining and essential anthology featuring 100 pioneering, eco-minded writers.
Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis. By Rowan Jacobsen. 2008. Bloomsbury, $25 (9781596915374).
Jacobsen celebrates the marvels of the honeybee, reveals the many ways we’ve en-dangered this essential pollinator, and calls for action to prevent a “fruitless fall.”
Greasy Rider: Two Dudes, One Fry-Oil-Powered Car, and a Cross-Country Search for a Greener Future. By Greg Melville. 2008. Algonquin, paper, $15.95 (9781565125957).
Melville’s larky tale of a coast-to-coast road trip in a car running on french-fry oil, including stops at a wind farm, a renewable energy lab, and a green home, is splen-didly entertaining and educational.
Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America. By Thomas L. Friedman. 2008. Farrar, $27.95 (9780374166854).
Friedman makes the all-important connection between business and environmen-talism in this call for a green revolution.
The Hudson: America’s River. By Frances F. Dunwell. 2008. Columbia Univ., $74.50 (9780231136402); paper, $29.95 (9780231136419).
The beautiful and historic Hudson River became “grossly polluted,” a story with a happy and instructive ending brilliantly told by Dunwell, a key figure in the river’s restoration.
Nature’s Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm. By Steven I. Apfelbaum. 2009. Beacon, $25.95 (9780807085820).
Ecologist Apfelbaum candidly chronicles the complex challenges he faced while re-storing an 80-acre swath of woefully depleted and toxic southern Wisconsin farmland and turning it back into a thriving prairie.
Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles. By Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly. 2008. Overlook, $26.95 (9781585678600).
A fun book about smog? Jacobs and Kelly capture the aura of 1950s sci-fi movies in this lively history of Los Angeles’ monstrous smog.
Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land. By Amy Irvine. 2008. Farrar/North Point, $25 (0-86547-703-5).
Drawing on her Mormon family history, Irvine revels in Utah’s breathtaking beauty and protests its destructive exploitation.
Why I Came West. By Rick Bass. 2008. Houghton, $24 (9780618596751).Bass tracks his ardor for the wild, especially his love for Montana’s Yaak Valley, in
this moving and instructive memoir of his life as a writer and wilderness activist.
Top 10 Books on the EnvironmentDown at the Docks.By Rory Nugent.Feb. 2009. 304p. Pantheon, $24.95 (9780375420641). 974.4.
Nugent, a sailor and a rambunctious travel writer, lived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, for 17 years, collecting the edgy stories that fuel this transfixing portrait of a vanishing world. Writing with the brio, precision, and wry wit of the king of narrative nonfiction, Joseph Mitchell, and sharing Mitchell’s em-pathy for those who live outside the cage of rules, laws, and common sense, Nugent anchors the tempestuous “riches to rags” history of New Bedford to a motley crew of waterfront denizens, capturing the cur-rents of their voices and the storminess of their makeshift lives as fisheries are wiped out. There’s mechanic Mako and fixer Pink. Stoic Marie and tough Fatima, proprietors of a dockside café and descendants of a long line of Portuguese fishermen, and Sword, a Vietnam vet, junkie, and fisherman by way of the town’s defunct textile miles. Piracy, drugs, embezzlement, black markets––New Bedford’s criminality thrives while marine life collapses, taking the town’s once-golden fishing culture with it. Nugent’s electrifying rogue’s gallery reveals the deep truth about humankind’s reliance on and abuse of na-ture. —Donna Seaman
Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution.By Auden Schendler.Mar. 2009. 304p. PublicAffairs, $26.95 (9781586486372). 333.79.
Kermit the Frog said it best: “It’s not easy being green.” If it were, amends Schendler, we’d already be doing it—as he has been, and in the most unlikely of places. As di-rector of Community and Environmental Responsibility for the Aspen Skiing Compa-ny, Schendler was challenged with bringing green practices to a place where the clientele were more interested in the sustainability of their perfect tans than of the planet. The concept of renewable energy and the reality of climate change were anathema to a hos-pitality corporation that spared no expense when it came to guest comfort; even com-pact fluorescent bulbs were a hard sell. But if the paradigm can be shifted in Aspen, it can be changed in Altoona. Frankly chroni-cling how an internationally renowned resort found both innovative and pragmatic ways to make recycling, biofuels, and other earth-friendly applications profitable, Schendler frames his environmentally sound arguments in practical terms every business executive, home owner, and government official can re-late to. —Carol Haggas
Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers.By Laura Pritchett.May 2009. 240p. illus. Univ. of Oklahoma, paper, $19.95 (9780806140131). 363.72.
When readers are weary or leery of
adFe2.indd 25 2/3/2009 11:39:18 AM
26 Booklist February 15, 2009Adult
environmental books full of data and doom, they can turn to novelist Pritchett’s spiky col-lection of personal essays about going green the old-fashioned way. firift used to be the guiding principle in nearly every household. Clothes, jars, bags, string—everything had multiple lives. But with the rise of consumer-ism, household ecology was largely abandoned. Not so for Pritchett, who, from childhood, has been an avid alley cruiser and Dumpster diver, Thnding treasures in trash. Proud of her gleaning ways, and certain that reclamation and recycling are essential practices in this time of bursting landThlls and oceanic trash islands, she invited fellow garbage-pickers to share their views of the waste-not, want-not life, and the result is a lively and provocative assemblage. Kathy Lynn Harris pays tribute to her tough rancher grandmother, the queen of reuse. Eliza Murphy’s beachcombing essay reveals the terrible truth about the marine plastic plague.Others share stories of ffea mar-kets, garage sales, and roadkill. fiese tales from the scavenging front are unexpectedly philosophical, conThding, funny, and aflect-ing. —Donna Seaman
Heatstroke.By Anthony D. Barnosky.Mar. 2009. 288p. Island, $26.95 (9781597261975). 577.2.
Barnosky uses a unique approach to address
the problem of global warming. Rather than dwell on human factors, he oflers a host of examples from the past to illustrate how animals of previous eras survived or failed to adapt. From the recent discovery of a grizzly/polar bear hybrid (a “pizzly”) to dead zones in the PaciThc Ocean, he chronicles various irrefutable changes to earth’s climate. Chapters focusing on long-term studies at Kew Gardens and Yosemite Park make good use of research dating back to John Muir and other early naturalists. More contemporary discoveries involve wolf eradication and the successful re-introduction of this essential species in Yellowstone National Park, and the area’s fossil record, which reveals how “the Yel-lowstone ecosystem responded to what was the most signiThcant global warming event, prior to the current one, in the past 3,200 years.” Wolves are more than a po-litical topic, Barnosky proves, just as the Canadian pizzly is likely not an isolated phenomenon. In straightforward language, this sensible climate-change book presents solid evidence from earth’s deep history. —Colleen Mondor
YA/S: High-school students looking for solid facts rather than partisan arguments on this subject will value Barnosky’s focus on published studies and the fossil record. CM.
Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond.By Meg Daley Olmert.Feb. 2009. 288p. Da Capo, $26 (9780306817366). 304.2.
Many people will attest to the happiness pets bring, but few are aware of the neurochemi-cal basis. In one of those delectably synergistic books that tie together threads of science, his-tory, and everyday life, Olmert explains the evolutionary processes behind what E. O. Wilson calls biophilia, our love and need for animals. fie complex story begins with the hormone oxytocin. First identiThed as the agent for labor contractions and breast-feeding, oxytocin is now recognized as the biological factor in social bonding. Olmert tracks the far-reaching power of oxytocin back to our Ice Age ancestors’ transformation into hunters, the forging of communities, and the welcom-ing of wolves around the hearth. As wolves evolved into dogs, it is oxytocin that turned them into “man’s best friend,” and the same mutually beneThcial oxytocin-enhancing chem-istry makes possible the close bonds between humans and horses, cattle, and cats. Studies proving the remarkable therapeutic eflects of pets bolster Olmert’s mind-stretching assertion that our close relationships with other species are organically necessary for our well-being. More proof of the astonishing intricacy of life’s interconnectivity. —Donna Seaman
PO Box 860 | 185 Millerton Road | Millerton, NY 12546 | (800) 562-2139 | (518) 789-8700 | FAX (518) 789-0556www.greyhouse.com | e-mail: [email protected]
Two Resources You’ll Want to Add to Your Environmental Studies Collection
American Environmental Leaders: From Colonial Times to the Present “Highly recommended for high school, academic, and public libraries needing environmental biographical information.”
–Library Journal, Starred Review
A comprehensive and diverse collection of biographies of the most important figures in American environmentalism. Coverage includes 400 men and women who have made a significant contribution to environmental issues over the last 200 years, ranging from scientists to advocates, politicians to actors. Additionally, an Historical Timeline, new Primary Documents and Bibliography and round out the text. This important resource will prove useful to the reference collections of public, university and high school libraries and environmental studies departments.
Pub. Date: October 2008 | Two Volumes | Hardcover ISBN 978-1-59237-119-8 | $195.00Ebook ISBN 978-1-59237-230-0
Environmental Resource Handbook, 2009/10 “Extensive coverage… the intrinsic value of the information makes it worth consideration by libraries with environmental
collections and environmentally concerned users.” –Booklist
Comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of environmental resources and statistics. Section I: Resources, provides detailed contact data for over 7,000 environmental organizations, including Associations & Government Agencies, Foundations, Conferences, Research Centers, Educational Programs, Legal Resources and much more. Section II: Statistics, provides over 100 tables and charts on Toxic Chemicals, Recycling, Climate and more, for all major US cities. This new edition is a must-have resource for environmental consultants, educators, researchers, environmental science departments, and public or academic libraries.
Pub. Date: July 2009 | Softcover ISBN 978-1-59237-433-5 | $155.00Available in print and online database formats
environ_half_ad_1.indd 1 1/16/09 1:32:15 PM
adFe2.indd 26 2/3/2009 11:39:32 AM
