books
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Two books that blew my mind
I have a piece in the latest issue of the American Prospect called “This Is How You’ll Get There.” It’s a review of two books: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), by journalist Tom Vanderbilt, and Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century, by […]
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I paid $50 for this book and all I got was this lousy feeling of hope and goodwill
I received a free review copy of The Power of Half, but it ended up costing me $50. Fifty bucks that won’t go toward a much-needed (fine, much-wanted) pedicure, about a dozen cinnamon lattes, a month of cable or my cell phone, or a couple of weeks worth of bus fare for my ride to […]
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Ask Umbra’s Change Agent: Hannah Salwen
What would you do with half? Half the house, half the lattes, half the TV watching, half the Tweets, half the email checking? More importantly, what would you do with the other half — the extra space, funds, and time? Dearests, meet 17-year-old Atlanta Girls’ School junior Hannah Salwen (you may have read about her […]
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A Seussical retort to a “Green Coal” company claiming the Lorax name
A new coal-gasification company has named itself LoraxAg, after the consummate Seussical eco-hero, The Lorax. It’s admittedly part of a move to brand the company as advancing the mythical-sounding “Green Coal Technology.” (That’s trademarked, naturally.) “Green Coal” doesn’t sound musical to the Seussical.Photo: Chris1051 via Flickr “The Lorax is the protector of the truffula trees,” […]
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Would you trade a bigger house for more happiness?
In New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s column on Sunday, he recounts the story of then-14-year-old Hannah Salwen and her dad Kevin, and how a chance encounter with a homeless man catapulted their family into swapping their high-end home for a more modest abode and donating half of the proceeds to charity. Just reading that […]
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Raj Patel on Colbert
[vodpod id=Video.5067665&w=425&h=350&fv=] Raj Patel, author of the food-politics tome Stuffed and Starved, has a new book out on the failure of neoliberal economics. It’s called The Value of Nothing, after the immortal Oscar Wilde quote about how “nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” A couple of nights ago (above), […]
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Win a signed copy of ‘Antarctica 2041’! [updated]
Update: The contest is over–congrats to our five winners! Look for more literary competitions and lots of great reading tips at our new books page. Welcome, dear readers, to Grist’s first book review contest. There are prizes to be won, so listen up. We’re giving away five autographed copies of explorer Robert Swan’s arresting new […]
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‘Water’ author Stephen Solomon talks resource intelligence
Author Stephen Solomon recently suggested we need an “Al Gore of water” — a public champion to raise the profile of water scarcity threats and opportunities, as Gore has done for climate change. Solomon, an economics journalist, makes a bid for that role himself with his new book Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, […]
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The most inspiring climate and energy books of 2009
Not that we haven’t been informed. That’s the message from an incredible year of new books on climate destabilization, dirty energy policies, bogus Big Coal campaigns, a vibrant anti-coal movement, a growing coalfield resistance to the tragedy of mountaintop removal, and the still big possibility of renewable energy sources to refresh our survival chances on […]
