November 30, 1998
An ambitious report on the global environmental crisis, Hertsgaard's (A Day in the Life) new book is based on his round-the-world odyssey, from 1991-1997. Refuting skeptics, he aims to show that Earth's ecological crisis is real and deepening. His frontline dispatches on air and water pollution, acid rain and resource depletion in China, Africa, Brazil, Thailand, Greece, Russia and Eastern Europe are chilling. Drawing on interviews with Czech president Vaclav Havel and energy expert Amory Lovins, as well as with public health officials, UN administrators, economists and Greenpeace activists, Hertsgaard details several interrelated crises: the worldwide impact of automobiles; runaway population growth; the environmental consequences of Western-influenced consumption patterns in developing nations; nuclear waste disposal, nuclear terrorism and the threat of nuclear war. Hertsgaard's travelogue is not without adventure: he retraces Winston Churchill's 1907 trip across Africa and explores the Amazon rain forest in a riverboat with a Brazilian family. Regarding the U.S., Hertsgaard proposes a "Global Green Deal" for the Clinton administration. The West, he says, should take the lead in uniting rich and poor nations by sponsoring public investments in nascent industries such as solar power. In addition, he suggests overhauling tax policies to encourage corporate giants to protect ecosystems. This eloquent wake-up call deserves a wide readership. Agent, Ellen Levine. $40,000 ad/promo; first serial to Atlantic Monthly; author tour.
December 1, 1998
Journalist Hertsgaard began his seven-year odyssey in 1991. While he poses a question (implicit in his subtitle) that many before him have tackled, he makes a worthwhile contribution to the debate. Major chapters explore the extreme complexity and global connection of basic issues, including hunger, the role of the automobile, population growth, and the enormous issue of global warming. Hertsgaard also explores capitalism and free-market economies as contributors to, and possible solutions for, some of the world's environmental problems. Not just another doomsayer (though his message is intense), Hertsgaard offers both explanation and personal narrative, leaving the reader informed, involved, and thinking. Recommended for all environmental collections and suggested for all public libraries.--Nancy J. Moeckel, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH
January 1, 1999
Hertsgaard--who has written for "The New Yorker," "Mother Jones," "Harper's," and other magazines and published books on the Beatles, press coverage of Ronald Reagan, and nuclear energy--spent much of the past decade in search of a global perspective on environmental issues. He explores pollution and population in China; retraces Winston Churchill's 1907 trip through Eastern Africa; visits Thailand and examines the automobile's role in that nation and around the world; goes to Russia and studies the impact of nuclear power there and elsewhere, including the U.S.; heads to the Amazon rain forest in Brazil to see the impact of population growth on natural resources; and returns to a cabin among the sequoias in California to contemplate what he's found. Hertsgaard's "Earth Odyssey" includes an analysis of the limitations of the United Nations' 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, a critique of "sustainable development" and of the Clinton administration's record on the environment, and a conclusion that urges "a Global Green Deal . . . put[ting] people to work restoring our environment." ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)