Power down : options and actions for a post-carbon world

 by Richard Heinberg. Heinberg presents an extraordinary assessment of the stark realities that will confront people in a post-fossil-fuel world. He claims that grave problems of energy depletion, environmental degradation, and overpopulation loom over the horizon and should be urgently addressed. The book begins with an overview of oil and gas depletion. The next four chapters focus on four major options available to industrial societies over the next four decades. Chapter 2 discusses the path of competition for remaining resources, while chapter 3 examines the path of cooperation, conservation, and sharing. In chapter 4 Heinberg emphasizes that it is unrealistic to wait for a magic elixir that will facilitate a painless transition in which market forces come to the rescue and avert a catastrophic collapse. The fourth option is explained in chapter 5, as the author urges economies to be "relocalized" so as to build community lifeboats. In the final chapter, Heinberg explores how important groups within global society--decision-making elites of government, finance and industry, the antiwar and antiglobalization movements, and ordinary people--are likely to choose among these four options. An exceptionally well-written volume. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Particularly useful to senior undergraduate and graduate audiences. --Choice (Check Catalog)

Baby, we were meant for each other : in praise of adoption

 by Scott Simon. Simon, host of NPR's Weekend Edition and author (Pretty Birds), shares an entertaining and affecting narrative about his experience adopting two daughters from China and his take on what it means to be a father. While he doesn't go into personal whys and wherefores, he animatedly relates the journey that he and his wife, Caroline Richard, took to parenthood: falling in love with the thumbnail photo of the infant who became their daughter, Elise; meeting her in Nanchang; bringing her home to join a French-Irish-Catholic-Jewish extended family in Chicago; and returning to China to adopt Paulina, their second daughter. Almost a prerequisite in any book about adoption is the question of attachment after abandonment, and Simon nimbly acknowledges and dispels Nancy Verrier's concept (from The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child) while guiding adoptive parents toward compassionate awareness. Simon's answer to "Can I love someone's else's child as much as my own?" is a resounding "Yes! Yes! At least as much and more!" - which echoes the tone of his lively, openhearted book. This adoptive parenting memoir is a standout among books on the subject, with Simon on the page much the same as Simon on the radio - informative, enlightening, and enjoyable. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)

Brain Gain: Rethinking U.S. Immigration Policy

By Darrell M. West
"Despite the appealing image of the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants to the shores of the U.S., the actual history of immigration is far more complex and fraught with contradictions. Four years before the statue was dedicated, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. West offers a historical overview of immigration policy, legislation, border patrols, quotas, and other restrictions on immigrants as the nation has needed labor infusion or fretted over the loss of jobs and national security. The 9/11 terrorist attacks ratcheted up worries about immigration, and Arizona’s tough immigration law accents heightened concerns about the nation’s borders. West draws on opinion surveys, analysis of media coverage, and research on legislative actions to analyze how we have come to the present expensive and highly bureaucratic process of legal immigration and the emotionally charged and explosive issues surrounding undocumented workers. He also highlights the contributions of immigrants€"the “brain gain” in commerce, technology, culture, arts, and education€"that should be taken into account when considering immigration policy."  (Booklist Reviews)   Check Our Catalog

The Crisis Caravan; What's Wrong With Humanitarian Aid?

By Linda Polman
"In a narrative that is impassioned, gripping, and even darkly absurd, journalist Linda Polman takes us to war zones around the globe—from the NGO-dense operations in "Afghaniscam" to the floating clinics of Texas Mercy Ships proselytizing off the shores of West Africa—to show the often compromised results of aid workers' best intentions. It is time, Polman argues, to impose ethical boundaries, to question whether doing something is always better than doing nothing, and to hold humanitarians responsible for the consequences of their deeds."  (Publisher Description)   Check Our Catalog

Boiling Mad; Inside Tea Party America

By Kate Zernicke
"Boiling Mad is Kate Zernike’s eye-opening look inside the Tea Party, introducing us to a cast of unlikely activists and the philosophy that animates them. It is a movement full of color and contradiction: the Tea Partiers loathe big government, but many are on Medicare; they push fiscal responsibility, yet some have declared bankruptcy. They have energized the electorate, but further polarized it, too.
Far from a fringe movement, the Tea Party reflects longstanding discontent among Americans who might otherwise share little in common. We have to understand it if we are to understand politics in 2010 and in the future. Boiling Mad will dispel the myths and reveal the truth about the Tea Party and what it means for our country."  (Publisher Description)   Check Our Catalog

The Polluters; The Making Of Our Chemically Altered Environment

By Benjamin Ross
"The engrossing, infuriating history of American pollution.
In their first book, environmental scientists Ross and Amter point out that King Edward I of England prohibited coal burning in London in 1306. This first antipollution law was largely ignored, a foretaste of things to come. As the authors summarize America's pollution history from 1860 to the 1960s, readers will squirm as offending industries routinely brush off feeble local and state efforts and commiserate with sympathetic officials of the Bureau of Mines (the only federal office with pollution oversight). When pressure grew, industry leaders warned that "so-called" pollution might not be harmful, adding that "drastic" government action would cost jobs, so scientists should first determine the facts. Unfortunately, this tactic—"spill, study, and stall"—worked superbly. Early researchers revealed the dangers of leaded gas (1921) and DDT (1939), but proponents had no trouble finding spokesmen who disagreed. Studies proved that chromium, uranium and asbestos caused cancer long before industries agreed to do anything besides fund studies. Everyone credits Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) for jump-starting environmental-protection efforts, but only after 1970 did the burgeoning conservation movement acquire the clout to pass relatively effective laws. Despite all their evidence, the authors don't embark on a mere antibusiness screed. In fact, one mildly sympathetic chapter recounts DuPont's positive efforts. From the 1930s, top executives considered pollution a serious problem. However, their policy statements and exhortations to division managers had some effect but never fully persuaded them that clean-up expenses took priority over profits...because they didn't.
An important, disheartening account of widespread willful ignorance."   (Kirkus Reviews)   Check Our Catalog

Exiles In Eden; Life Among The Ruins Of Florida's Great Recession

By Paul Reyes

"Floridian Reyes works “trashing out” foreclosed houses€"emptying the houses and cleaning them for resale. With Florida being, arguably, ground zero for the country’s ongoing economic disaster, Reyes has plenty of work; thinking as a writer, he dubs his melancholy labors a kind of “moody archaeology,” piecing together the stories of ousted home owners from the items they abandoned. Some are victims of predatory mortgage originators, thousands of whom have been convicted of financial crimes. Others have lost their jobs and then their homes. Some are simply fools, “an absurdity,” he writes, “that seems indigenous to Florida.” Exiles in Eden is engaging, insightful, compassionate, and often charmingly idiosyncratic. His portrayals of foreclosure’s victims are uniformly sad, but he tempers the mood a bit with perceptive analysis of the state’s history, socioeconomics, and odd allure: “For most of its history, through today, Florida was the weird backyard of the American imagination, as deadly as it was salubrious.” Boom, he notes, is the “backbone” of the state’s economy, and constant development and change leave residents “little sense of feeling anchored.” Recommend this one both to followers of the economic crisis and to anyone who feels Florida’s “odd allure.” ( Booklist Reviews).   Check Our Catalog

Cultures Of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 911, Iraq

By John W. Dower
"This somber tome compares Japan's decision to attack Pearl Harbor in 1941 and that of America's to attack Iraq in 2003. In addition to assessing what planners were thinking, Dower analyzes how they came to believe their war would be both short and victorious. Indicting a range of intelligence deficiencies and bureaucratic breakdowns in each case, Dower critiques most cogently the cultural and even emotional mind-sets of the strategists. In both cases, he argues, a sense of injured innocence, an apocalyptic fear of the consequences of inaction, and contempt for the opponent prevailed, reinforced by selective appropriations of history. Dower particularly indicts proponents of invading Iraq for the analogy made to the American occupation of Japan—Dower is an expert on the subject (Embracing Defeat, 1999). In extended corollaries to his main subject, Dower also discusses the firebombing of Japanese cities, the atomic attacks of 1945, and the destruction of the World Trade Center in terms of psychology, symbolism, and morality. A forceful indictment of warlike attitudes, Dower's work will spark debate about history and the Iraq War." (Booklist Reviews)   Check Our Catalog

Somebody Else's Century: East and West In A Post Western World

By Patrick Smith
"Written explicitly for a Western audience, this searching and philosophical text eschews the demographic and statistics-driven approach to the rise of Asia, opting instead for an essayistic and existential meditation on modernity and modernization. Smith (The Nippon Challenge) focuses on China, India, and Japan and skips nimbly between topics as varied as raids on an Indian temple dating back a millennium, the impact of the Opium Wars on China's development, and Nietzsche's reflections on travel and "the foreign." The author examines each country's relationship to economic transformation and to their pasts, describing the new century as a "post-Western" era, one in which Westerners will confront the challenge that this book suggests has largely defined the contemporary Asian experience, the sense of living in an era that does not belong "to us." This demanding, rich book provides few answers, but offers a valuable intellectual frame for approaching the evolving relationship between the East and the West. "(PW Reviews)   Check Our Catalog

Dirty Sexy Politics

By Meghan McCain
"One of the Republican Party's most outspoken and well-known young members writes about her experiences on the campaign trail during her father's presidential bid, how the party veered so far off track, and why she is still a Republican."  (Publisher Description) Check Our Catalog

Girls On The Edge; The Four Factors Driving The New Crisis for Girls

By Leonard Sax
" According to family physician/psychologist Sax (Boys Adrift; Why Gender Matters), when parents don't teach their daughters well, the marketplace fills the vacuum with what it thinks girls should look like, do, and be—and it's all wrong. Sax clarifies his four driving factors in this new crisis: sexual identity: the concept of lifelong commitment is almost unknown, and sexual confusion results when girls don't know what to expect from boyfriends; the cyberbubble: kids are constantly in touch via technology, and girls become microcelebrities, constantly living and acting as if in front of a crowd; obsessions: without realizing it, girls are obsessed with becoming ultra thin, perfecting their grades, and abusing "fun" (alcohol, drugs, sex); and environmental toxins: early puberty is related to chemicals in plastics and phthalates in skin creams. Sax supports single-sex high schools, gender-appropriate sports for girls, and nurturing girls' spirituality to provide orientation when a crisis occurs."   (LJ Reviews)  Check Our Catalog