Monday's green books series: 'Planet Earth Gets Well' by Madeline Kaplan (and a copy giveaway)

Many of us think of Planet Earth in terms of Mother. Author Madeline Kaplan sees it as child. And this child feels sick in her new children's book 'Planet Earth Gets Well', which is our book today on Monday's green books series.

So what's wrong with Planet Earth? "I have a runny nose. My ice caps are melting; and no matter what I do, I can't stop them from running into the ocean." This is just one of the environmental problem he is describing in the book (including high fever because his tempreture rises), which is formed in a way of dialogue between the child Planet Earth and his mother, who is no other than Mother Nature.

Mother Nature's diagnosis is very clear: "you have a bad case of global warming". She cares about her son's health and therefore tries to instruct him how to take better care of himself and gives him advice how his people (us..) should behave to take his temperature down.

There are three main things I like about the book:

1. The basic idea of Planet Earth as a child that doesn't feel well and asks his mom, Mother Nature, for advice. Somehow it seems to me that it fits reality much better than any other metaphoric description of Planet Earth.

2. The positive educational spirit of the book - this book aims to help young readers to think proactively about their environment. It gives children educational information about 'heavy stuff' such as global warming, energy depletion and deforestation, and at the same time stays optimistic and tries to show them that it's not too late to make Planet Earth feel better.

3. The illustrations are great. Taillefer Long's full color beautiful illustrations make it a vivid and attractive book for children.

This is Kaplan's first children's book and I enjoyed it very much. It is an intelligent children's tale that tries to give kids facts and explain concepts which are not that easy to explain to them (and sometimes not even to adults), but also tries to keep it fun and entertaining, as much as a story about a sick Planet Earth can be.

The bottom line is that children can identify with the poor little fellow and understand that they can make him feel better by doing little things -for example, "they could save trees in the forest by using less paper". This is an easy lesson and I'm sure many children will get it right. If their parents will understand and implement it as well, then there's a much better chance that Planet Earth will eventually get better.

Book details:

Book's name: Planet Earth Gets Well

Author: Madeline Kaplan
Illustrator: Taillefer Long
Publisher: BookSurge Publishing
Publication Date: April 20, 2008
The book is available on Amazon.com.

And this book is also going green with Eco-Libris: As we announced earlier, the author, Madeline Kaplan, is working now with Eco-Libris to green up the book - a tree will be planted for every copy sold at the book signing events and at other promotional sales. Readers who will buy the book on these events will also receive our sticker with their book, saying "One tree planted for this book".

GIVEAWAY ALERT!!!
Author Madeline Kaplan will be giving away a copy of the book, and it also comes with a tree that will be planted for it with us and our sticker of course.

How you can win? please add a comment below with an answer the following question: what do you think children can do to make Planet Earth feel better, and what would be the best way for them to convince their parents to join them? if you have any personal stories of your own kids, please share! Submissions are accepted until Saturday, August 18, 12PM EST. The winner will be announced the following day.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant a Tree for every Book you Read!

And the winner in a copy of 'Welcome to Shirley' is..

Thank you for all the participants in our giveaway of the book 'Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town' by Kelly McMasters we reviewed last Monday.

We got great ideas for eco-themed fiction novels, and the winners is Cindi, who suggested the following:

Hello! My suggestions of books are:"Ecotopia" by Ernest Callenbach, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard, "Prodigal Summer" by Barbara Kingsolver and "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson.

Congratulations Cindi and thank you to all the other participants for the great tips on these great green books!

And don't forget to keep following our giveaways. We have many more green books to review and give away so stay tuned (we'll have one tomorrow!).

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: plant a tree for every book you read!

Strand's customers are going green!

We are very proud in our collaboration with Strand Book Store, New York's independent landmark book store. Strand are taking part in our bookstore program and customers at the store can plant a tree for every book they buy there and receive our sticker at the counter!

Now we're even more proud to update you that as of last month Strand Book Store's customers balanced out 999 books they bought at the store which resulted in 1,299 new trees! These trees are planted with our planting partner RIPPLE Africa in Malawi, Africa.

Strand are celebrating their customers' support of the environment with a new poster you can find all over the store. You can also see the beautiful poster right here:

So if you're in New York, don't forget to visit Strand. With their tremendous selection of more than 2.5 million used, new and rare books, I can assure you a great experience!

Strand's address is: 828 Broadway (at 12th St.) New York, NY 10003. You're also welcome to check out their website at http://www.strandbooks.com (and don't miss their impressive list of events).

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: plant a tree for every book you read!

Paranoia in New Jeresey this upcoming weekend!

Here's a quick reminder: Author John Braun will sign copies of his new book 'Paranoia' at The Book Bin, 725 Arnold Ave., Point Pleasant Beach, NJ this upcoming Saturday (August 9). The signing event will start by noon.

John is collaborating with Eco-Libris to green up his book - a tree will be planted with us for every book sold at this signing event. Also, all buyers of the book at the event will receive with the book our sticker saying "One tree planted for this book". One more thing - 10% of Profit from sales of the book will be donated to the Twin Towers Orphan Fund (http://www.ttof.org/).

So if you're around Point Pleasant Beach, NJ this Saturday, you're welcome to stop by the Book Bin and get yourself a copy of Paranoia. If you want to learn more about this great book, check out our post 'Paranoia is going green with Eco-Libris."

Yours,
Raz @Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: plant a tree for every book you read!

Greenpeace ask you to show the forests some love

Greenpeace has an important mission for you: to show the European Commission how much you love forests!

Why? they explain it on their website:

The European Commission has delayed a vital vote on protecting forests from illegal logging till September. We want to make sure the commissioners don't forget about it during their summer holiday. We need you to help us make an extra impression before the September vote.

We all love the forests, and we would like to showcase all that love to the EU (and we know for a fact that the EU doesn’t have anything against some loving). The forests already have made an effort themselves!

And this is the mission they have for you:

Take pictures and/or videos of yourself and your friends spreading the love in a forest.
Submit your pictures in the flickr group or post your video as an answer to ours. They will use these photos to make a collaborative video that they’ll show the European Commission in September.

And there's also a great example to what exactly Greenpeace mean by spreading the love in a forest (btw - if you want to see more of their excellent videos, check out eco-tube):


You're also invited to send a petition to the President of the European Commission from Greenpeace website.

So let's show the forests some love and hopefully it will pay off in Septemeber!

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: plant a tree for every book you read!

Green Options - Outstanding in the Field a Farm to Table Cookbook by Jim Denevan

As part of Eco-Libris' ongoing content partnership with Green Options Media, we feature a post that was originally published by Beth Bader on July 31 on Eat.Drink.Better. Today's post is a review of a new green cookbook of chef and artist Jim Denevan. Yummy!


If buying local is the way to lower your carbon footprint and enjoy foods at their peak, then you likely can’t get any more local than chef and artist Jim Denevan’s “farm-to-table” dinners. You see, for Denevan’s events, the table is usually just a few feet from the very crops that are being served.

Denevan’s unique concept, dubbed Ouststanding in the Field, began with a few such on the farm dinners and has expanded over the last nine years into a country-wide tour of dinners. Denevan and his team travel in a 1953 bus dubbed “Outstanding.” They follow the harvest season, hosting dinners at farms, and even in sea caves, anywhere that the best of ingredients can be sourced — just feet away from the table. The dinners feature the farmers, fisherman or local food artisans whose harvest comprises the menu, alongside the efforts of local chefs.

The dinners themselves are set up like works of art, arching tables, candles in the earth, each diner’s plate brought from home to give him or her a way to add a personal touch to the event. The events, held for one night only, then whisked away to being anew in another locale have a fleeting beauty to them, not unlike Denevan’s own sand sculptures, some of which stretch for miles, and last only hours.

Monday's Green Book Reviews: Welcome to Shirley by Kelly MacMasters (+ free book giveaway)

It's been a while since we reviewed here a book that was not a how-to guide, a children's book, a manifesto or an investigative tract about corn, oil or paper. This not a surprise, and illustrates well what Bill McKibben was saying in a grist essay more than three years ago, bemoaning the lack of suitably inspiring art for the green movement (thanks to Jeff McIntire-Strasburg for turning me onto this essay.)

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong about how-to guides, and in fact they are crucial right now, but art, which I consider the writing of a novel to be, has this special way of inspiring people in the right place and in the right time, in a way that not many how-to guides can ever aspire to.

From this perspective, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town by Kelly McMasters is a hybrid of a book. Part memoir, part historic and part investigative, it oscillating between three different narratives.

The first narrative is a personal memoir of the author growing up in Shirley, a small dead-end town on the South Shore of Long Island, New York. When her father, a down on his luck pro-golfer and ski coach, relocated their family yet again for a new job at a nearby Hamptons golf club, five years old Kelly was thrilled. McMasters' writing is very personal, sensitive and catchy, especially when describing her childhood. Her enthusiasm to the new town, neighborhood and people is easy to get into. Life for her are walks in the woods in the wildlife preserve just around the corner with her new best girlfriends, and discovering for the first time a sense of community in the tight knit mostly Italian neighborhood, with their perfectly normal quirky way of living. All things she never had before while on the road following her father's jobs. Especially endearing is her recalling of the community's celebration of 4^th of July, with the tipsy dads setting off fireworks, and the kids crashing on the lawn after a day romping around the neighborhood's backyard swimming pools. This part is actually my favorite in the book, and I wish her telling of her older selves was quite as patient in its unfolding.

The other thread woven into the tale is the history of the town itself. It starts from the life of its founder, Walter T. Shirley, a young man in the city who gave up his dreams of show business on the New York vaudeville stage for a successful career as a real estate tycoon. Shirley was promoted by him as the “City of Flowers”, an affordable community close to nature with lots starting as low as $295. It was marketed to the urban working class as a dream within reach, with ads in Italian bringing in many buyers. However, similarly to the developer's stage dreams, Shirley's promise was never fulfilled. Lack of planning in the rush to build more and more left the town without a center and proper sewage, while the lack of easy beach access or any other visitor's attractions left the town undeveloped, neglected eventually and with a bad reputation.

The tension between the town's apparent lack of appeal, and McMasters' childlike fascination and inexplicable love for it is probably the most interesting aspect of the book. This tension is reinforced and multiplied once the third thread of story is introduced, and that is of the cancerous radioactive pollution emanating from the nearby Brookhaven National Laboratories complex, just 6 miles up the road. It was built in the 50's while the area was still considered remote from habitation, yet close enough from the leading research universities. However with the building of Shirley and other communities nearby, the laboratory's nuclear waster is now endangering the water resources of the whole region. And thus Cancer begins to play a major and constant role in the lives and deaths of the people of Shirley.

With active nuclear reactors on site up from the 50's and up to 2000 and a complete lack of proper community education and outreach until very recently, it is not a surprise that the laboratory dedicates a whole section of its website to contradicting and refuting McMasters book, and their the lab's role in the increased number of cancer cases in the communities around their laboratory site. They're still not really reaching out. For example, this is the best “apology” the book can get out of them:

“The Laboratory acknowledges that its environmental stewardship in the past was very different from what it is today. During the last decade, Brookhaven has made great strides in cleaning up the environment and keeping it clean, and we work hard to be a good neighbor.” (From the Brookhaven website, Aug 4 2008)

The lab's communications department's choice of words and this use of inane speech makes me doubt very much their sincerity in being a good neighbor. Unfortunately for McMasters' circle of friends and acquaintances from the town, this “very different” environmental stewardship in the past may have caused deaths, broken up families, and broken up entire neighborhoods.

And that what makes her continuous love to the broken town a real surprise. At some point, she even considers seriously moving back there with her husband to start a family, but apparently and inexplicably (at least in the book) decides on Pennsylvania instead.

So does Welcome to Shirley qualify to McKibben's artistic eco call to arms? I sincerely think it does. McMasters is a gifted writer and I hope to read more of her work, and that her next book will continue to draw on ecological themes, while maybe being a work of fiction.

About the Book

Book's name: Welcome to Shirley

Author: Kelly McMasters

Publisher: Public Affairs (April, 2008)

Note: Back in April, Kelly McMasters worked with us balance out the books at her book launch event. Read her thoughts about working with Eco-Libris. We hope to have the pleasure of collaborating with her again in the future.

GIVEAWAY ALERT!!!

I'll be giving away my review copy, with a tree planted for it of course. How can you win? Suggest inspirational eco-themed fiction novels for people to read, and for me to review at the Eco-Libris blog. Also explain why do you think these books are suitable, and if you want to add your own mini-review, go ahead :). Submissions are accepted until Saturday, August 9,12PM EST. The winner will be announced the following day.

All the best,
Eylon Israely
eylon@ecolibris.net

“Plant a Tree for every Book you Read!”