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Tobin Hack
> book reviews
Green Reads
Yogurt, birds, shopping, and Shamu—the latest in eco-minded volumes
Big Green Purse: Use
Your Spending Power
to Create a Cleaner,
Greener World
By Diane MacEachern
Avery/Penguin Group,
$16.95
Reduce, reuse, recycle,
and vote with your wallet is the 21st-century
treehugger’s mantra.
Best-selling environment writer Diane
MacEachern shows
women—who spend 85
cents of every dollar in
the marketplace—how
to start wielding their
purchasing power for
the good of the planet,
and buying green as
if their lives depended
on it. Worth toting
around in your bag or
glove compartment, Big
Green Purse explains,
in layman’s terms,
concepts like nanotechnology; lists names of
companies women can
trust; and walks buyers
through difficult choices
in everything from food
to lawn care to clothing.
What Shamu Taught
Me About Life,
Love, and Marriage:
Lessons for People
From Animals and
Their Trainers
By Amy Sutherland
Random House, $18
When it came to handling
the human animals in her
life, particularly subspecies American husband,
Amy Sutherland used to
subscribe to the school
of nagging. But in 2003,
when she began trailing
the nation’s top exotic animal trainers to research
this book, Sutherland
noticed their techniques
work on people as well
as on killer whales. Five
years, one New York Times
most-e-mailed article, and
myriad social experiments later, she’s here to
show you how to pick
your battles, use positive
reinforcement, and really
notice behavior, your own
included. But watch out—
Sutherland has shamu-ed
all her friends and family, and she just might
shamu you, too.
92 | february-march 2008
Stirring It Up: How
to Make Money and
Save the World
By Gary Hirshberg
Hyperion, $24.95
Having helped Stonyfield
Farm grow from a piddling
seven-cow operation in
the 1980s to the $330
million goliath it is today,
“CE-Yo” Gary Hirshberg
knows a few things about
making sustainability profitable. He’s navigated the
mostly uncharted territory
that is “marketing with
a mission” in corporate
America, and been taught
eco-waste management
by a bunch of hogs (long
story). But instead of
preaching, Hirshberg offers
his hard-earned secrets
with a handshake and a
gleam in his eye. His is a
happy-ever-after tale of
how a handful of small,
idealistic companies
(Stonyfield and righteous
peers like Clif Bar, Zipcar,
and Seventh Generation)
discovered they could
join the big league without selling out.
The Life of the Skies:
Birding at the End of
Nature
By Jonathan Rosen
Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, $24
Life is an exploration of
birding as the intersection between nature
and the industrial world
and as Rosen’s antidote to “nature deficit
disorder.” Enriched with
revelations from history,
science, and theology,
Life is also generously
sprinkled with literary
candy (references to DH
Lawrence and Saul Bellow, among others). It’s
an elegant and honest
account of how Rosen
learned to live fully by
learning to bird (and in
particular, search for the
elusive, possibly extinct,
ivory-billed woodpecker). By the time you put
the book down, you’ll
agree that “looking up is
the best we can do.”
Your Inner Fish: A
Journey into the
3.5-Billion-Year
History
of the Human Body
By Neil Shubin
Pantheon, $24
When fish invaded land
375 million years ago,
they didn’t look a whole
lot like the doctors,
lawyers, and investment
bankers they would
eventually become, but
they did already share
one important physical
attribute with humans:
hands. Fish is a strange
and thorough tour
through the human body,
with paleontologist Neil
Shubin—leader of the
first team ever to uncover
a fish-with-hands fossil—
as your expert guide.
Walking readers through
head, shoulders, knees,
and toes (and yes, eyes,
ears, mouth, and nose),
Shubin pauses at each
stop along the way to explain how much we share
with our mammalian and
reptilian ancestors.