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| How To Accessorize With Tiny Birds: Let them read to you before bed. Their passion for classic American literature will rekindle a love for stories you once experienced through the help of CliffsNotes and tenth grade English class. |
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| How To Accessorize With Tiny Birds: Most have a basic understanding of homeopathic remedies. Let them treat you with traditional Chinese medicine next time nasopharyngitis strikes. |
The great thing about holidays for me is time to read books without any of the interruptions that usually chequer my days.
So for this trip I took a small stack of books and enjoyed wending my way through them.
To clarify before anyone asks, I am blessed to be a speed-reader. The downside of this, is that it makes reading a very expensive exercise as I am always looking for new material to read. The upside is that one-day someone is going to see what a blessing this is and offer me a job reading and reviewing books.
So for those of you looking for something to read, or avoid (because forewarned is forearmed) here is a run down on my holiday reading.
First book was Ultra-marathon Man by Dean Karanzes. I’ve mentioned this book here. Husband is now reading it. It certainly highlights the differing ways genders respond to texts. I spent most of it being both horrified and amazed at his exploits, and in awe of the power of the human mind. Husband however has been in fits of laughter reading passages that personally I thought were masochistic to say the very least.
I really enjoyed the book and its’ certainly shifted my mindset whilst training. A 5km training run seems almost meaningless in comparison to Karnazes 20 mile runs before breakfast most mornings!
My second book was read poolside (a lovely place to be) while Mr Small dozed beside me and the older two frolicked in the pool. It’s called “What Kate did next” by Lisa Heidke, not to be confused with “What Katie did next.” I’ve read both books and trust me when I say there is a world (and a century or more) of difference between the two.
Heidke’s novel makes for easy reading, and explores the struggle to maintain a family, work balance for women whilst at the same time enjoying a semblance of fun in our lives. Her protagonist Kate faces the minefield inevitably faced by mothers juggling a return to work, in what can only be described as a dysfunctional workplace also coupled with the challenges faced by parents of school age children.
As a former high school teacher, the events Heidke writes of came as no surprise to me, but I suspect they would make for eye opening and possibly a sound warning to parents, that vigilance and involvement in their children’s lives doesn’t end when their children gain possession of a mobile phone. In fact, I’d say the battle has only just begun.
Heidke’s novel looks at everything from the challenges of step-parenting through to the difficulties faced by teenagers through peer-pressure, and whilst her ending does much to tie her narrative up neatly, she also works to position her reader to close the novel feeling simultaneously satisfied and alarmed.
My next read was “A pressure cooker saved my life” by Juanita Phillips. Phillips was and is a highly experienced newsreader and presenter, as well as being a wife, mother and now writer. The book is interesting. The typeface of the book is simply beautiful and Phillips peppers the book with interesting gems and recipes.
The book is a mix of helpful tips, sociological observations, family anecdotes and a smattering of recipes. Initially I wasn’t sure exactly what the book was trying to be, however Phillips says early on: “ …it’s basically a collection of postcards from the work/family battlefront written in fifteen minute bursts between kids and work and cooking and all the usual domestic crisis..”
The book is divided into sections about life, food, time, home, family, pressure cooking and recipes. They are all useful, but I admit I found the constant re-iteration that the pressure cooker was the reason Phillips was able to manage her many challenges seems superficial on occasion. She is honest and engaging throughout her narrative, it is simply overworking what could have been a successful premise that was the problem (in my opinion)
HOWEVER I am intrigued by what she does say and coming up soon will be a post devoted to trialling her recipes and using a pressure cooker for the first time in my existence.
The next book was a birthday present from my parents. It’s called “The bread of angels” by Stephanie Saldana. This is an incredibly beautifully written book. I’m not usually a huge fan of overly descriptive prose but Saldana does it in such a way as to evoke an authentic sense of time and place. The story is a recount of her life (incredibly she is only just 30) from her year studying in Damascus. As an American in Syria at the time just post 9/11 she gives us the human faces of a wide variety of Middle Easterners that was both refreshing and instructive. Through her eyes we see thoughtful, well-educated Muslim women, politically disenfranchised merchants, displaced families from Iraq now living in contemporary Damascus, the world's oldest inhabited city.
She lost me a little in the second part of the novel as the love story began to unfold, interwoven as it was with her spiritual journey.
Whilst parallels with ‘Eat, pray, love” by Elizabeth Gilbert (and I wasn’t a fan of that book) are inevitable I would venture to say I liked this a great deal more. Saldana’s book highlights her wanderlust, in contrast to what I felt was Gilbert’s naval gazing exercise.
Having read this, I moved onto “Miscellaneous Voices” edited by Karen Andrews. The book is a collection of blog posts from various Australian bloggers and was compiled by Andrews to, in her words “experiment to see how this writing, these writers, stand up to the challenge of the page; or to put it another way, to put them in front of another audience which may be more page-loyal.”
As I read each post, I was struck by how unique and distinctive each piece of writing was. Andrews chose pieces from across the spectrum. Given its broadness, some resonated with me far more than others. Throughout though, I appreciated the richness of each piece. That’s the beauty of blogging, the fact that I have access to a range of writing and writers who share their stories, their creativity in a medium that, it could be argued, is often far more accessible than a book sitting remote and often financially inaccessible on a shelf in a bookstore.
My next two books were part of the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson. I read Book One and Book Three. Yes, I know I didn’t read the second one. They didn’t have it in store when I went on my pre-holiday book hunt. It was okay though, each book is pretty much a self contained narrative and whilst the second one certainly merges into the third, you can read them individually.
There is very little one can say about a trilogy of books that have been extensively reviewed world-wide and have sold millions of copies.
The only thing I would add is that even though I was warned the books were violent I was completely taken completely unawares by it and one particular scene in the first novel left my eyes watering in shock.
That said, I LOVED the fact that the names of the characters were, through their very Swedishness, unfamiliar to me and the plot was one I often had to actually think about.
The irony is that Larsson died after handing in his trilogy for publication and so, never saw the huge success his books were to become.
And now having read all those books and written about them. I’m going to have a little lie down.
What have you read lately that you loved?
Do you agree or disagree with my opinions?
I’d love to know what you think!
Many books offer environmental understanding and perspective, but few of them offer a genuine path for tangible change. This is exactly what Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, the new book by Ray Anderson, attempts to do.
In 1973, Ray Anderson founded Interface, a company he built into the world's largest manufacturer of modular carpets. But in 1994, he charted a new course for his industrial, petroleum based company after reading Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce. In the abrupt, soul shattering understanding that followed, Ray Anderson launched a new transformative direction for Interface - to become not only sustainable, but restorative.
That year, he delivered a new vision to his management team that would ultimately make Interface a world leader in sustainability and environmental responsibility:
"So here's the vision (I) share with you today: I want Interface to be the first name in industrial ecology, and here's my challenge to you. I want to know how long it's going to take us to get there. Then, I want t o know what we'll need to do to push that envelope and make Interface a restorative enterprise. To put back more than we take from the earth and to do good for the earth, not just no harm. How do we leave the world better with every square yard of carpet we make and sell?"
That question was eventually answered by Interface's Mission Zero, a formalized corporate vision to make the company fully sustainable by the year 2020. They have come along way towards that goal. Over the past 15 years while governments and industries in the United States insisted that the 7% reduction in greenhouse gases called for by the Kyoto Protocol would destroy the economy, Interface lowered theirs by 71% while increasing sales by two thirds and doubling earnings.
Their environmental success did not stop there. They have also increased renewable energy use from 0 to 28%, water use has decreased by 72%, and the recycled content of their carpets has gone from 0.5% to 24%. These are just a few examples of Interface's transformation to date.
In Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, Ray Anderson details this success and outlines a pathway that other corporate leaders can follow in transforming their own organizations. He shares what he's termed the "7 faces" of sustainability that Interface embraced in guiding their efforts to eliminate waste, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and build environmental responsibility into every aspect of their operations and corporate culture.
Those faces are:
- Moving towards zero waste
- Eliminating emissions or rendering them benign
- Increasing efficiency and renewable energy
- Closed loop recycling and turning waste into raw material
- Making transport systems resource efficient
- Sensitizing employees, suppliers and communities to environmental responsibility and opportunity
- Redesigning commerce to assess accurate costs, set real prices, and maximize resource efficiency
Confessions follows Interfaces success and best practices through each of these faces while weaving in first hand stories of the employees and innovators who created these solutions. At each stage, the value of human creativity and innovation is emphasized, alongside the need to harness these gifts as an integral element in the path to true sustainability.
The book is more than platitudes and idealism. By his own admission Ray Anderson is a competitive capitalist with an eye pinned keenly on the bottom line and ultimate success of his business. And this, I'd argue, is a primary reason for his success. In Confessions, he has supplied a pragmatic roadmap for continuous environmental improvement that is anchored in the constraints faced by organizations in the real world. It is a bottom line approach that should gain the attention of industrialists throughout the developed word, where corporations are facing high input costs and the aftermath of the global economic recession. The competitive advantage Interface enjoys thanks to their efficiency and low waste operations can form a new model for the changing economic reality that corporations are facing here in the emerging era of sustainability.
Despite the author's industrial career, the book goes well beyond the typical line between industry versus environment and points towards a more fundamental relationship, one that accurately places human endeavour within the context of the natural world. It is not an indictment against industry, but instead points to its true and sustainable place as a system that operates through the gifts, and limits, of the natural world. Anderson calls this "thinking in the round", a reference to the perfectly efficient and renewable closed circle that all natural systems operate within. It is a sound model to follow.
And in following that model, the Anderson reveals a deep faith that because human beings are an extension of the environment itself, our best enterprises, values, and talents can find alignment and synergy with the natural laws of sustainability. Readers may respond, "This is the view of one person, in one small corner of the industrial world. How does this apply to global environmental problems facing our global society?" I'll let Mr. Anderson answer in his own words,
I am convinced that having a sustainable society for the indefinite future depends totally and absolutely on the vast, ethically driven redesign of the industrial system about which I have written, triggered by an equally vast mind-shift. But - and this is the hard part - that shift must happen one mind at a time, one organization at a time, one technology at a time, one building, one company, one university curriculum, one community, one region, one industry at a time, one product at a time until we look around one day and see that there is a new norm at work, and that the entire system has been transformed.
Confessions reminds us that while the problems facing the environment are large, the seeds of change are always the same. They encompass the dedicated actions of each individual person doing what they can to improve the world for the better.
However, the magnitude of each person's responsibility is also proportionate to the amount of impact they are responsible for creating. Ray Anderson stands apart not for his environmental awareness, but because he took the rare approach of both confronting the full impact of his petroleum based business, and accepting a level of responsibility that was equal to this impact.
Confessions of a Radical Industrialist and the success of Interface's environmental efforts to date are both testament to this acknowledgment of responsibility. Interface's journey towards complete sustainability is still being written, but with luck and hope we can look forward to reading about those last steps of the journey in Ray Anderson's next book.
For more information visit the Interface website, Mission Zero, or see Ray Anderson speak on TED.
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With the debate over global warming slowly shifting towards action, Al Gore's follow up to An Inconvenient Truth promises to open the way for on the ground change and real solutions. Our Choice, his latest book, is set for release on November 3rd, 2009.
Today Vice President Gore announced that his next book, Our Choice, will be published by Rodale in the US and by other publishers internationally on November 3, 2009. Picking up where An Inconvenient Truth left off, Our Choice utilizes Mr. Gore’s forty years of experience as a student, policymaker, author, filmmaker, entrepreneur and activist to comprehensively describe the real solutions to global warming. A co-recipient of the Nobel Peace prize in 2007 for his environmental work, Mr. Gore continues to make sense of the pressing issues we face and Our Choice will unquestionably inspire and rally those ready to fight for solutions that were deemed impossible only a short time ago.
Said the Vice President, "It is time for a comprehensive global plan that actually solves the climate crisis. Our Choice will answer that call.”
It can't come soon enough.
Sonia Mitchell has written a review of the original Last Chance To See book, over at PopMatters.com, and I thought it was worth a link if you're still on the fence about reading this terrific book. She gives it an 8/10.
Adams treads a delicate line between making it clear how threatened some of these animals are and staying optimistic as to the future. It’s possibly too late for some of them, but others still hang on, and with increased public awareness perhaps comes an increased chance of survival. Adams’ character portraits of the conservationists in the field are witty and skillful, and leave the reader with some hope that with (often charmingly insane) people like these devoting their lives to these animals there might be a future for some of them.
Thanks to Dave who points out that the re-issue edition of Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
This new paperback edition by Arrow Books is now available for pre-order at Amazon.co.uk.
Similarly, the TV tie-in book published by Collins, Last Chance to See by Mark Carwardine and Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine finished recording the Whales episode of the TV series very recently. Stephen is currently back in New York, playing with his Kindle2. They only have the Komodo Dragon episode left to film in April.
**LAST CHANCE REMINDER**
I'm giving away a second-hand hardback 1977 edition (ex-library copy) of Gerald Durrell's book "Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons
If anyone would like a chance to read it now that I'm done with it, please simply enter your name in this ContestMachine widget below. Or, if you know someone else who may be interested, do let them know, or just post this competition to your favorite social network(s). US readers only please. Contest closes 02/19/09 09:47 PM
I'm giving away a second-hand hardback 1977 edition (ex-library copy) of Gerald Durrell's book "Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons
If anyone would like a chance to read it now that I'm done with it, please simply enter your name in this ContestMachine widget below. Or, if you know someone else who may be interested, do let them know, or just post this competition to your favorite social network(s). I'll pick a random winner in two weeks time. US readers only please. Contest closes 02/19/09 09:47 PM
OHMYNews.com has a review of a new book entitled "Witness to Extinction: How We Failed to Save the Yangtze River Dolphin
Turvey's elegiac twilight trawl between the Yangtze's soggy mud banks heavy with wet grass and tree skeletons consumes six sorry weeks of 2006.The book is also available as a Kindle edition
After covering the middle section of the great river twice, he and his peers become increasingly despondent, resentful, almost mutinous, irked by funding problems and failure.
, and also at Amazon.co.uk
.
The BBC Last Chance To See "Radio" page has been updated to include the second full radio episode "Gone Fishing!". This episode features Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine in their hunt for the Yangtze's Baiji Dolphin, which led to one of the most well loved passages in the original Last Chance To See book - the trip to the Shanghai Friendship Store. The BBC have pushed back the release of the Rodrigues Fruitbat radio episode, originally scheduled for today, until December.
The radio series episode guide in David Haddock's "The Story of Last Chance To See" has been updated with the link to all the audio released so far.
According to theBookseller.com, Last Chance To See is to be re-issued in June 2009 with a new introduction by Richard Dawkins.
The imprint acquired UK and Commonwealth rights in the book from agent Ed Victor. A paperback edition will be published in June 2009, featuring a new introduction from Richard Dawkins.The article does say "this autumn's BBC2 series", but I'm fairly sure it's going to be autumn 2009. Autumn 2008's highly anticipated Stephen Fry documentary series is going to be "Stephen Fry - In America
[...]
Stephen Fry and Carwadine are to present the BBC2 series, which follows up on the species 20 years on and will feature audio recordings of Adams’ voice. HarperCollins are publishing the tie-in.
" which begins on BBC1, 9pm on October 12th in the "New World".
David Bird wrote this interesting article, published on Canada.com, about his trip to the Galapagos Islands, in the footsteps of Charles Darwin, which he describes as an almost religious experience.
I was champing at the bit to do likewise, to follow in his footsteps, but Julio informed us that no one was allowed ashore on that part of San Cristobal Island. It was to these islands that Darwin sailed on the H.M.S. Beagle in 1835 to observe and collect specimens as part of the development of his theory of natural selection, which lead to his book, On the Origin of Species.Darwin's books, now in the "public domain", are available in free ebook format in several places, and have been nicely formatted for devices such as the Kindle and Sony Reader over at the premier ebook community mobileread.com. I have both "Origin of Species" and "Voyage of the Beagle" on my wonderful Sony Reader, I just haven't got around to reading them yet. Sometimes difficult when you have such a large library at your fingertips.
I had taught the speciation of Darwin's finches for years in a Wildlife Ecology course on McGill's Macdonald campus and it was almost a religious experience to physically go there.
[...]
The other bird, whose name elicited giggles from everyone, was the blue-footed booby. Like most of the birds in the islands, these goofy-looking gull-like birds shamelessly danced and called to convince females to come and copulate with them.
Link: Darwin books available at mobileread.com
REMINDER: The Sixth Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture will take place at the Royal Geographic Society in London, on Wednesday 12th March 2008.
The lecture will be presented by psychologist Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. His subject will be "The Stuff of Thought, Language as a Window into Human Nature", with proceeds going to Save The Rhino.
And in some exciting new news, the lecture will be followed by a very special LIVE 30th anniversary performance of material from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Simon Jones as Arthur DentStephen Fry?
Geoffrey McGivern as Ford Prefect
Mark Wing Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox
Susan Sheridan as Trillian
Roger Gregg as Eddie
Stephen Moore as Marvin The Paranoid Android
With a Very Special Guest as the Voice Of The Book
As this site is all about a book, I imagine there's a few readers drop in from time to time. If anyone's interested, I have a couple of invites available to the fledgling site at www.swaptree.com. I've used it to swap quite a few books, CDs, DVDs and games and its working pretty well. If you're interested, drop me a line by email.
Also, I've recently been reading quite an old hardback edition of George B.Schaller's book "The Year of the Gorilla". It is a very entertaining account of a Mountain Gorilla study expedition in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It's too old to list on SwapTree, but if anyone would like to read it, please drop me a line by email and I'll be happy to send it to you. Perhaps you'd consider a nominal donation to my Save The Rhino fundraiser as a thankyou...?
The current issue of Doctor Who Magazine (#381) features an interview with novelist Jacqueline Rayner about her Tenth Doctor novel "The Last Dodo". She said that the idea of an "I-Spy book of extinct animals" tickled her, something that would be, on the face of it, impossible... Unless you were a Time Lord.
Doctor Who Magazine asked the question:
DWM: Was your interest perhaps piqued by [former Doctor Who Script Editor] Douglas Adams' Last Chance To See? You've referred to a few of the same very endangered species as he did - the aye-aye, the kakapo and so on...
No, I've been interested as long as I can remember - I was a passionate member of the then-World Wildlife Fund. But both the radio series and book of Last Chance To See are heartrending pieces of work, which I deliberately didn't reread while doing my research - I didn't want to risk subconsciously plagiarising anything. But anyone who's not experienced Last Chance To See, please go out and get it now!
Here's some very exciting news from the Daily Telegraph about the BBC's plans to make their substantial archive available online. The article cites David Attenborough's "Zoo Quest For A Dragon" as a prime example of the content that the service could offer. The BBC has millions of hours of broadcasting archives that could be made available for free to British licence fee payers, and with commercials for overseas viewers.
Lost gems of radio and television, some of which have never been repeated, include an interview with Martin Luther King filmed shortly before he was assassinated, and a 1956 episode of the nature series Zoo Quest in which a young David Attenborough captures the komodo dragon on film for the first time.Attenborough's "Zoo Quest For A Dragon" is a programme and book we've mentioned before on this site, and Whirligig TV have a page all about it here - Zoo Quest For A Dragon.
The episode has never been repeated but could soon be available online as part of the ambitious project, led by the BBC's director of future media and technology, Ashley Highfield.
The page has includes a video clip from the film which you can download here (364k - Real format).
Amazon.co.uk has Zoo Quest products available, and I STRONGLY recommend reading the book, or even better (because David Attenborough reads it), get the book on CD. It's a great adventure. Zoo Quest books and tapes are also available in the US: Zoo Quest stuff at Amazon.com
A recent episode of BBC Radio 4's "Excess Baggage" featured an interview with Philip Briggs, a travel writer and tour leader specialising in eastern and southern Africa.
Philip has been travelling in East Africa since 1986 when he went backpacking in Uganda and has been back regularly since. Tourism is an important part of the economy and Uganda’s main tourist attraction is its wildlife.He talks about the sometimes easy, and sometimes difficult task of tracking Mountain Gorillas through the forest. He is also the author of the soon-to-be-released "Uganda, 5th: The Bradt Travel Guide
" travel guidebook.
Nandini read the closing chapter of Last Chance To See when she was young. She confesses that she didn't understand it then, but does so now. Read her thoughts (and the chapter itself) at her blog Nandini's Niche.
There's a story I heard when I was young that bothered me because I couldn't understand it. It was many years before I discovered it to be the story of the Sybilline books. By that time all the details of the story had rewritten themselves in my mind, but the essentials were still the same. After a year of exploring some of the endangered environments of the world, I think I finally understand it.
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Amazon.co.uk is currently selling "Last Chance To See" for 50% off the retail price. Snap up another copy while you can, or buy it as a gift for someone special!
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