Earth Odyssey : Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive and compelling!
Review: The real story of our global environmental crisis that holds one like a great novel. Bravo! Mark Hertsgaard. For your daring, and your insight, and for taking us all on your travels around the world that we might all see what our consumer oblivion is doing to our precious planet earth. This book is a great read, friends. More than a nudge that it's time to wake up - it inspires one to do so, and to tap our neighbor on the head too.

Rating:
Summary: Eye-opening, sobering, necessary
Review: There are very few books that I read cover to cover, but this book held my interest to the very end. Hertsgaard has wonderful writing style that transforms dry facts into a narrative story of the people he visited. The information is sobering. Our planet is trouble far beyond what I would have imagined. I have never been an environmental activist, but I think that may soon change. Everyone needs to read this book. We need to stop hiding our heads in the sand and become proactive. This is the only "home" that we have.

Rating:
Summary: Unsettling, Thoughtful Warning For All Of Us
Review: This account of our creeping environmental crises ranging from the Sudan to Russia, China and Brazil, and the U.S., is made all the more convincing by the author's calm, almost dispassionate, reportorial style. I'm not hopeful though that it will make a bit of difference because we really are like that proverbial frog in a slowly boiling kettle who is cooked before he realizes it. Maybe, someone, will pull a technical rabbit out of the hat and save our descendents? May they forgive us.

Rating:
Summary: An Environmental-Issue Must-Have
Review: This is a heart-wrenching and eye-opening tale of our earth's health, yet the book maintains throughout a sense of hope in humanity's abilities. I believe that all priviledged developed-world citizens should read this to understand how the "other half" of the world's inhabitants are forced to live. Hertsgaard created here a smooth and flawless read that never becomes tedious.

Rating:
Summary: A compelling view of the future of planet Earth.
Review: This is an excellent book, written in plain English with clear explanations, great examples and vivid depictions of the future we face if we don't get our act together now. Perhaps the most frightening part of the book was the detail of Al Gore who, as an ardent ecologist wrote a book on environmental issues only to throw it all to the wind when he became Vice President of the USA. If he can do this, what hope for the rest of us? I recommend this book to any student, at any level, who wishes to understand the environmental issues we face. However, be warned - this book will depress you! There are no holds barred and you will come away with a feeling of hopelessness.

Rating:
Summary: Making Sense of Our Times
Review: This title is currently being recommended by the McLaughlin Group, the award winning public affairs televison program.

Rating:
Summary: Reality Check!!
Review: Well-written with a ton of high-voltage facts. Finally a writer that gets out there to see it for himself. The quotes at the beginning of each chapter are great. As a friend of mine once said about the Greenhouse Effect "...Yes, and it is only the beginning."