New in the Library: Voice of Witness Series

In our media-saturated world of the twenty-first century, where so many things clamor for the public's fractured attention and for a place on the agenda, some voices are lost. Some of them lack the resources and abilities to compete in the information marketplace or are simply drowned out by the trivial noise of entertainment and vacant commercialism. Some voices are actively suppressed by more powerful interests. Who decides what stories we do get to hear? And then how do we decide what we listen to? What are the effects of such silencing and ignorance for our understanding of the practice of justice and power in the world?

Engaging with such questions, and others even more basic to our humanity, is Voice of Witness. Founded by author Dave Eggers and human rights scholar Lola Vollen, Voice of Witness is an ongoing nonprofit series of books that collects the firsthand accounts of men and women affected by contemporary human rights abuses and social injustice in the USA and around the world. The scope of the project involves numerous editors, translators, historians, activists, academics, novelists, and volunteers who have undertaken to render interviews with these individuals into story. They are books where the dispossessed are given space for their own words.

In doing so, the books provide a perspective on complex situations unique from what can be found in the immediate reports of journalism, the dry facts of statistics, or the brief testaments of social media. It is a perspective from within crisis and out of the voices of the people whose lives have been the most seriously disrupted, whose humanity has been the most severely violated. They are people in failed states beset by violence and brutal outrages of power, such as Sudan, Burma, and Zimbabwe. They are people subjected to the failures of states, namely the United States in the series so far, with books focusing on the wrongly incarcerated, the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the precarious existence of undocumented immigrants, and the governmental overreach of the War on Terror. A constant theme is that these are men and women who have been displaced – from their homes and communities, from the lives they thought they would and should have. The displacement comes from violence, from social barriers, from absurd systems of laws, from the petty self-interest of the powerful, and from the suspension of rationality. It leads to terror, victimization, exploitation, and even enslavement.

Their stories are not delivered simply as accounts of victimhood to be pitied, however. They do depict lives circumscribed by anxiety, where people are forced to make difficult choices and take precarious risks. They are accounts that necessarily focus on the habits and strategies of perception needed to survive in these worlds on the edges of the world we live in. But they are not limited to these things. The storytellers have stories of full individual lives, and the makers of these books want you to know them. For in so doing, they hope to present the greatest challenges possible. As author Brian Chikwava writes in the forward to Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives, “The disconnect between the stories told by a state and those told by its citizens at best obscures the moral choices that must be made, and some states may well prefer it that way.” The stories cannot hope to represent the full experience of a population who has suffered, but they do not need to in order to raise complicating questions.

Voice of Witness includes in its mission statement this goal of raising awareness, and much can be learned from the books. The editors do not pretend, though, that all will be well if we listen, these being stories about the world. Another recurring theme of the collections is how the act of storytelling is in itself an empowering and humanizing one for these storytellers who have been abused and ignored. Through that act, they can reclaim their individuality and their human dignity against those who would deny their voices. It is the chance to locate lives displaced. Through their stories, they tell themselves back into the world.

The following books from the series were kindly donated to the library by Voice of Witness, where they are available for check out. Learn more about Voice of Witness, the project, and the books at www.voiceofwitness.org.


Lola Vollen & Dave Eggers, eds. Surviving justice: America's wrongfully convicted and exonerated. (2008)

Lola Vollen & Chris Ying, eds. Voices from the storm: The people of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. (2008)

Peter Orner, ed. Underground America: Narratives of undocumented lives. (2008)

Peter Orner & Sandra Hernández, eds. En las sombras de Estados Unidos: Narraciones de inmigrantes indocumentados. (2009)

Craig Walzer, ed. Out of Exile: Narratives from the abducted and displaced people of Sudan. (2009)

Peter Orner & Annie Holms, eds. Hope deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean lives. (2010)

Maggie Lemere & Zoë West. Nowhere to be home: Narratives from survivors of Burma's military regime. (2011)

Alia Malek, ed. Patriot acts: Narratives of post-9/11 injustice. (2010)

Library Closed June 10 to June 17

The library will be closed June 10 through June 17, so that the librarian can go to the annual Special Librarian Association conference in Philadelphia to tell other librarians how important sustainability is and to learn how to leverage taxonomies for greater effectiveness. We apologize for any inconvenience. If you have items due during that week, just return them when the library reopens. If you have items due before that week, please think about returning them when the library reopens as well. If you do need to get into the library, contact Bruce DeMartini. Meanwhile, here are a few items we have added to the collection recently, some of which you might recognize because their authors spoke here at the center recently. If interested, you have until 3:00 pm this afternoon to check them out. Have a sustainable week!

Jay Walljasper and On the Commons. All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. (2010)

Veteran journalist Jay Walljasper is a fellow at and online editor for On the Commons, a commons movement strategy center connecting organizations, community leaders, and individuals with new ideas, practical solutions, and each other to create change. Their collection is an introduction to the broad range of ideas and activities of individuals and groups highlighting the importance of understanding and strengthening protection of the commons - those lands, waters, and other resources that belong to everyone. With success stories from communities around the world, it demonstrates how new thinking about our shared values relates to the economic, political, and cultural problems facing the world today.

Mark Brilliant. The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941-1978. (2010)

UC Berkeley Professor Mark Brilliant examines California's history to illustrate how the civil rights era was a truly multiracial phenomenon that was shaped and complicated by the presence of not only blacks and whites, but also Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans, and Chinese Americans, among others. Focusing on a wide range of legal and legislative initiatives pursued by a diverse group of reformers, Brilliant analyzes the cases that dismantled the state's multiracial system of legalized segregation in the 1940s and subsequent battles over fair employment practices, old-age pensions for long-term resident non-citizens, fair housing, agricultural labor, school desegregation, and bilingual education. While civil rights historians have long focused on the Southern experience and recently have turned their attention to the North, this work advances a new understanding of civil rights history that more fully reflects the racial diversity of America.

Rebecca Solnit. Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. (2010)

Learn to see the city in a new way in this atlas "of principal landmarks and treasures of the region, including butterfly species, queer sites, murders, coffee, water, power, contingent identities, social types, libraries, early-morning bars, the lost labor landscape of 1960, and the monumental Monterey cypresses of San Francisco; of indigenous place names, women environmentalists, toxins, food sites, right-wing organizations, World War II shipyards, Zen Buddhist centers, salmon migration, and musical histories of the Bay area; with details of cultural geographies of the Mission District, the Fillmore's culture wars and metamorphoses, the racial discourses of United Nations Plaza, the South of Market world that redevelopment devoured, and other significant phenomena, vanished and extant."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti. A Coney Island of the Mind. (1958)

From the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers and Publishers, this collection originally published in 1958 continues to be one of the most popular books of poetry in the United States, with more than a million copies in print. Unconventionality, satiric bite, and lyric beauty illuminate themes that resonate today.

New Books - April 2011

Happy Earth Day from the Whole Earth Library! Have a salutary day reflecting on your place in the natural world and hopefully eating a lovely picnic. Here are some books recently added to the collection that might help you with that, touching as they do on a variety of subjects from healthy food to environmental protection to nonprofit management and more. And see you at the Thoreau Center Earth Day Craft Fair, Friday, April 22, 11:30am to 2:00pm.

Temra Costa. Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat. (2010)

Sustainable food and farming advocate Temra Costa, former director of California's Buy Fresh/Buy Local campaign, profiles twenty-six women working to create a more regional, resilient, and transparent food system in America that respects the environment, supports our health, treats workers fairly, and strengthens local economies and communities. They are pioneering farmers, activists, chefs, and advocates embracing a wide range of approaches to grow food, prepare food, change policies, build new relationships between fields and eaters, preserve traditional cultures, and raise awareness about the far-reaching effects of the food choices we make. Thoreau Center connections: includes profiles of the Cultural Conservancy's Melissa K.Nelson and Claire Hope Cummings, and of Social Venture Network emeritus board member Judy Wicks.

Dyan deNapoli. The Great Penguin Rescue: 40,000 Penguins, a Devastating Oil Spill, and the Inspiring Story of the World's Largest Animal Rescue. (2010)

On June 23, 2000, the iron-ore carrier MV Treasure sank off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, releasing 1,300 tons of oil and contaminating a large portion of the habitat of the already threatened African penguin. Dyan deNapoli of the New England Aquarium joined 12,500 other volunteers from around the world in a massive three month effort to rescue these penguins, clean them, feed them, and rehabilitate them for release back into the wild. While ultimately one of the most successful penguin rescues ever, with over ninety percent of the oiled birds surviving, penguin populations worldwide are plummeting under pressure from increased ship transportation, pollution, irresponsible fishing practices, and climate change. Today, deNapoli actively campaigns to conserve penguins and protect the health of the oceans.

Janet Poppendieck. Free for All: Fixing School Food in America. (2010)

This first comprehensive assessment of school food in the United States explores its realities and the obstacles to its improvement. What is preventing schools from providing all children with free, fresh, appealing, and healthy meals? Poppendieck argues it is the result of specific social choices, including the disinvestment in public education, an industrialized food system, and school food programs operated on a business model rather than a public health approach. She presents the possibility of sweeping change based on innovative projects in action around the country today that support a vision of sustainable agriculture and that see school food expenditures as investments in the future health and well-being of our children.

Miriam Pawel. The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker Movement. (2009)

Former Newsday and Los Angeles Times reporter and editor, Miriam Pawel, tells the story of the United Farm Workers of America from the perspective of eight key participants - lawyers, sudents, clergy, and farm workers – who bring new insights into the spectacular growth and eventual collapse of the union, to the point that only a small percentage of California's farm workers are unionized today. Based on interviews and extensive research, including six hundred hours of tapes of meetings, rallies, and interviews recorded between 1969 and 1980, Pawel's nuanced analysis challenges popular views of Chavez's legacy, emphasizing the tension between his vision of leading a comprehensive social movement and the practical work of managing a union. The effects of Chavez's efforts to retain control and stifle dissent highlight the dilemmas faced by social justice movements as they seek to balance the vision of charismatic leadership with the slow effort of consolidating real gains for poor people.


Judith B. Margolin, ed. After the Grant: The Nonprofit's Guide to Good Stewardship. (2010)

“Congratulations, you got a grant!” From the Foundation Center, this collection written by expert fundraisers and foundation staff is a guide to what a nonprofit organization should do next to turn that grant proposal into measurable accomplishments, manage grant funds successfully, and build an enduring relationship with the funder through effective communication. Covering each step in the grant cycle, it also includes analytical case studies, and a troubleshooting guide for those inevitable times when things do not go according to plan.

Galina Tachieva. Sprawl Repair Manual. (2010)

Sprawl – the car-dependent pattern of development that has been the defining feature of most of the suburban growth in the United States since the end of World War II. Imposing heavy environmental, societal, and economic burdens, sprawl can be transformed into vibrant, livable communities through thoughtful design interventions, responsive regulatory frameworks, and new permitting strategies and financial incentives, as this book demonstrates. Step-by-step guides and case studies demonstrate how to repair the full range of suburban conditions from the regional scale down through to blocks, roads, and buildings.

And a special bonus pick by China Brotsky, Senior Vice President, Tides and Managing Director, Tides Shared Spaces:

K.M. Kostyal. Great Migrations: Official Companion to the National Geographic Channel Global Television Event. (2010)

"In a world of changing global temperatures and conditions on land and in the sea, the annual journeys of wild species become stories of astonishing strength and the sheer will to survive. State-of-the-art images — including heart-pounding scenes captured by world-class photographers and iconic stills from the film — offer exciting new perspectives on migratory animals and their remarkable behaviors, some of which have never before been seen or recorded." - from the publisher.

New to the collection on International Women's Day

Today is the 100th anniversary of Internatonal Women's Day, a global day commemorating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present, and future. In some places like China, Russia, Vietnam, and Bulgaria, International Women's Day is a national holiday. Here are some books we're adding to the collection today that explore the lives of women around the world, past and present:

Nadje Al-Ali & Nicola Christine Pratt. What kind of liberation?: women and the occupation of Iraq. (2009)

In the run-up to war in Iraq, the Bush administration assured the world that America's interest was in liberation--especially for women. What Kind of Liberation? reports from the heart of the war zone with dire news of scarce resources, growing unemployment, violence, and seclusion. Moreover, the book exposes the gap between rhetoric that placed women center stage and the present reality of their diminishing roles in the "new Iraq." Based on interviews with Iraqi women's rights activists, international policy makers, and NGO workers and illustrated with photographs taken by Iraqi women, What Kind of Liberation? speaks through an astonishing array of voices. Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt correct the widespread view that the country's violence, sectarianism, and systematic erosion of women's rights come from something inherent in Muslim, Middle Eastern, or Iraqi culture. They also demonstrate how in spite of competing political agendas, Iraqi women activists are resolutely pressing to be part of the political transition, reconstruction, and shaping of the new Iraq.

Lisa Shannon. A thousand sisters: my journey of hope into the worst place on earth to be a woman. (2010).

Lisa Shannon had a good life—a successful business, a fiancé, a home, and security. Then one day in 2005, an episode of Oprah changed her life. The show focused on women in the Congo, a place known as the worse place on earth to be a woman. She was suddenly awakened to the atrocities there—millions dead, women being raped and tortured, children starving and dying in shocking numbers. It was then that Lisa realized she had to do something—and she did. A Thousand Sisters is her inspiring memoir. She shares her story of how she raised money to sponsor Congolese women, beginning with one solo 30-mile run, and then founded a national organization, Run for Congo Women. The book chronicles her journeys to the Congo, meeting many of the sponsored women and hearing their stories firsthand. Along the way Lisa is forced to confront herself and learns lessons of survival, fear, gratitude, and love from the women of Africa.

Ida Rae Egli. No rooms of their own: women writers of early California. (1992).

In the wild, isolated Western frontier, where laws, traditions, and living conditions were like nowhere else in America, it was a bold act for a woman to write and to seek publication. Dame Shirley, Ina Coolbrith, and Mary Hallock Foote never achieved the fame and success of Mark Twain or Bret Harte, but they were celebrated writers in their time. They, too, wrote about California during the gold rush, but with a perspective all their own. Their writings, as well as the poetry, fiction, essays, memoirs, and diary entries of other women writers of their era, are collected in No Rooms of Their Own, which pays homage to the talent and experiences of these women who built the West.

New Books - January

Here is a look at some of the books we have added in recent weeks. Also, as you prepare for your spring cleaning or get rid of your old books as you replace them all with ebook copies for the reader you got over the holidays, we'd like to remind you of our relationship with Better World Books, which collects and sells books online to fund literacy initiatives worldwide. Those books they can't sell, they recycle. Our last shipment of 223 pounds of books they estimate to have saved three trees, 1,710 gallons of water, and 232 pounds of greenhouse gases. So if you're thinking of getting rid of something they might be able to sell, feel free to drop it off at the library, and we can get a new shipment ready. Thank you.

Jamie Court. The Progressive's Guide to Raising Hell: How to Win Grassroots Campaigns, Pass Ballot Box Laws, and Get the Change We Voted For. (2010) “How can progressives get what they believe they voted for?” Jamie Court is president of Consumer Watchdog, an award-winning, nationally recognized consumer-advocacy organization with offices in Santa Monica and Washington DC, and he has a long history of organizing successful ballot campaigns and reform initiatives in California. This book is his guide to using these tools and others for mobilizing public opinion, challenging special interests, and seizing the opportunities for change when elected officials disappoint. His five steps for creating change: Expose, Confront, Wait for the Mistake, Make the Mistake the Issue, and Don't Let Go.

David Abram. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. (2010) A book about exploring our entanglement with the rest of nature and reclaiming our sensual awareness of the whole of the living world around us in order to save it. “This directly experienced terrain, rippling with cricket rhythms and scoured by the tides, is the very realm now most ravaged by the spreading consequences of our disregard. Many-long standing and lousy habits have enabled our callous treatment of surrounding nature, empowering us to clear-cut, dam up, mine, develop, poison, or simply destroy so much of what quietly sustains us. Yet few are as deep-rooted and damaging as the habitual tendency to view the sensuous earth as a subordinate space...”

Laurie Garrett. Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health. (2000) Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laurie Garret's landmark examination of the decline of public health around the world. Through extensively researched and vividly detailed accounts of pubic health failures, she portrays a system that at the dawn of 21st century is incapable of dealing with outbreaks of disease and of providing people with the basic tools of physical well-being.

Peter North. Local Money: How to Make It Happen in Your Community. (2010) For centuries, people have responded to financial crises by creating their own local currencies. The latest crisis, having exposed the vulnerabilities of our financial system on a global scale, has been no different. Local currencies are just one of the tools with which communities are experimenting in order to build deeper local resilience and unleash the potential of their local economies. This book delves into the complicated issues surrounding these currencies and serves as a practical guide for those of you out there thinking about creating your own local money for local people.

Jan Gehl. Cities for People. (2010) In this work, architect Jan Gehl explains the concepts and tools he has used to transform sterile, modernist, and dysfunctional cityscapes around the world into lively, safe, sustainable, and healthy places. For Gehl, cities should be considered through the five senses so that they can be designed on a human scale that takes into account the ways people actually use the spaces where they live, work, and interact. Strengthening walking opportunities, creating inviting spaces to linger, ensuring opportunities for social and cultural diversity are a few of the methods he details, and even if you're not an urban planner, you will learn to look at your urban landscape in new ways. Extensively illustrated with over 700 photos and drawings of examples from Gehl’s work.

Dave Forman. Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century. (2004) “The central reality of our era is extinction. Nothing is more important. Mass extinction is our legacy as a species so far. No other moral challenge is so great as controlling our destructive power over nature,” writes Dave Forman, director of The Rewilding Institute. But he remains hopeful that the causes of extinction and ecological wounds can be halted. In response to the challenge, he lays out a bold vision and a practical strategy for restoring and reconnecting wilderness areas across North America based on recent insights from conservation biology and the historical experiences of the citizen conservation movement.

New Website, New Books

We have recently upgraded the software system that manages the library and revamped the library website to go along with it. The software is Koha, a free and open source package originally developed by Katipo Communications for the Horowhenua Library Trust in New Zealand. Development is now sponsored by an active community of libraries of all types and sizes, volunteers, and support companies from around the world. We hope it will enhance your library experience in a number of ways, including: Improved search functionality: New options for searching the library collection's catalog and new ways to refine your results should help you find items of interest. Additonally, you can subscribe to search results as RSS feeds, which will allow you to see when a new item is added to the catalog in your area of interest. The catalog also now supports use of Zotero, the open source reference management sofware produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. If you aren't familiar with it, it is a very useful tool for managing your research materials and creating citations. Tagging: In the spirit of Web 2.0, members can now attach their own descriptive keywords to items which will become a public part of that item's record. Why would you want to do this? Try a hard as we might I and other catalogers cannot anticipate every way to describe an item. This is your opportunity to help others by filling in the gaps. Or you can just tag those books you want to read later. Tags are public, but anonymous, and you can visit and edit your tagging history. Online renewals: In addition to being able to put books on hold online, members can now renew books online rather than coming down to the library to do it. Now you don't have to worry about overdues. Simply log in to your account and take care of it there. Not a member? Simply fill out a membership form and bring it to the library. Forget your log in information? Just contact the library at libary@thoreau.org. Like everything on the web these days, it is in permanent beta and will be in flux, so if something doesn't work or if you have any suggestions or questions, please feel free to contact me in the library or at libary@thoreau.org. And now if all of that hasn't piqued your interest, here are some of the new books we have added to the collection in recent months... Michael K. Stone. (2009). Smart by nature: schooling for sustainability. Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media. A guide to ecologically aware education for the twenty-first century from the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, a leader for nearly two decades in school reform for sustainable living. Documenting a growing movement of educators, parents, and students changing K-12 education throughout the United States, it presents firsthand accounts of success stories in rethinking school food, greening campuses, and embedding learning in community from a variety of public, private, rural, and urban schools. Beth Kanter and Allison H. Fine. (2010). The networked nonprofit: connecting with social media to drive change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Kanter and Fine detail tools and strategies to help nonprofits take advantage of the opportunities presented by new information and social media technologies. Filled with interviews and case studies from nonprofit managers who have found ways to use these tools effectively, it shows how to leverage the different kinds of connections enabled by these technologies to increase impact and how to navigate the transition from a top-down organizational structure to an open and networked approach that makes the most use of this new environment. David C. Korten. (2010). Agenda for a new economy: from phantom wealth to real wealth. Second edition, updated and expanded. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. David Korten is president and founder of the People-Centered Development Forum, chair of the board of YES! magazine, founding board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, and through his work and writings has long been a leader in the resistance to corporate-led economic globalization. This edition updates his book originally written in response to the financial meltdown of 2008 to expand his agenda for an alternative to the values and institutions of the Wall Street economy at the heart of that crash: a New Economy based on ecological balance, equitable distribution of Earth’s resources, and democracy responsive to the needs and values of ordinary people. William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer. (2009). The boy who harnessed the wind: creating currents of electricity and hope. New York: William Morrow. William Kamkwamba of Malawi was forced to drop out of school at age 14 when that country experienced its worst famine in fifty years and his family could no longer afford the $80 a year tuition. Determined to find a way to make life better for himself, his family, and his community, and inspired by an old science textbook he found in a nearby library, he built a windmill out of scrap metal, tractor parts, and blue-gum trees that produced the electricity that only two percent of Malawians could afford. William was able to return to school and has continued to help his village through the worldwide attention that his inspirational story has achieved. Nancy Knowlton. (2010). Citizens of the sea: wond rous creatures from the Census of Marine Life. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society. This book was released near the conclusion of the Census of Marine Life, an unprecedented and comprehensive ten year international effort to assess the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life globally. 2,700 scientists from over 80 nations around the globe participated in 540 expeditions and countless hours of land-based research to identify more than 1,200 new marine species, with another 5,000 or more still awaiting formal description. Authored by Nancy Knowlton, Sant Chair for Marine Science at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, Citizens of the Sea reveals some of this diversity through skilled underwater photography from National Geographic and Census researchers. Yellow Bird [John Rollin Ridge]. (1955). The life and adventures of Joaquin Murieta the celebrated California bandit. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Originally published in 1854, this book established the legend of Joaquin Murieta, the Gold Rush era Mexican bandit and folk hero who inspired numerous stories, the fictional character of Zorro, a movie, and the first Soviet rock opera. Persecuted by Americans and determined to seek revenge for their killing of his half-brother, Murieta organized an outlaw company number over 2,000 men who for two years menaced Californians with kidnappings, bank robberies, cattle thefts, and murders before he was killed by the California State Rangers. If he existed at all. Mark Sisson and Jennifer Meier. (2010). The primal blueprint cookbook. Malibu, CA: Primal Nutrition. Learn to re-harmonize your diet with your evolutionary genetic mandate and adopt simple, sustainable lifestyle behaviors. Mark Sisson is the founder & publisher of MarksDailyApple.com, and is credited with spearheading the worldwide "Primal" health movement that challenges many well-accepted elements of conventional wisdom by adapting the nutritional cornerstones of hunter-gatherer fare for the culinary tastes and variety of the 21st century. Jennifer Meier is a graduate of the prestigious California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, and she researched and tested each of the recipes in the cookbook over a two-year development period. Oliver A. Houck. (2010). Taking back Eden: eight environmental cases that changed the world. Washington, DC: Island Press. Using a set of case studies of environmental lawsuits brought in the U.S and seven other countries around the world beginning in the 1960s, this book describes a revolution at the nexus of law and ecology: ordinary citizens with lawyers using their standing as citizens in challenging corporate practices and government policies to change not just the way the environment is defended but the way that the public interest is recognized in law. Oliver Houck, environmental attorney, professor of law, and former General Counsel and Vice-President of the National Wildlife Federation, depicts the places protected, as well as the litigants who pursued the cases, their strategies, and the judges and other government officials who ruled on them.

New Books - August

Just in time for you to plan your Labor Day weekend reading activities, here are some books added to the library collection in the past few months. Not travelling anywhere but want to imagine you are? Try Douglas H. Chadwick's Yellowstone to Yukon: a portrait of a 500,000 square mile region spanning from the U.S. to northern Canada with one of the most remarkable collections of wildlife in the world that is facing increasing challenges from an expanding human presence.

Also consider the books below, and don't forget to peruse our catalog at library.thoreau.org.

Tyche Hendricks. The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport: Stories from the U.S. - Mexico Borderlands. (2010)

Tyche Hendricks is an editor for The California Report on KQED Public Radio, and she reported on immigration and immigrant communities at the San Francisco Chronicle for many years. For this book, she traveled throughout the U.S.-Mexico border region, talking to cowboys, environmentalists, nurses, nuns, factory workers, and other ordinary people who live and work in this dynamic, complex, often misunderstood area. They share a deep sense of their history and culture, and their stories bring to life and bring understanding to heatedly debated issues of immigration, drug violence, trade, manufacturing, and more.

Peter H. Gleick. Bottled & Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water. (2010)

Thirty billion plastic bottle of water are sold in a year in the United States alone, while billions of people around the world still lack access to safe water and sanitation. Peter Gleick, President of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security, examines the reasons behind the explosive worldwide growth of the bottled water industry in recent years and what it means for the future of drinking water, society, and the environment.

Julian Crandall Hollick. Ganga: A Journey Down the Ganges River. (2007)

Running from high in the Himalayas, through northern India, down to the sea, the Ganges for millions of Indians is not just a river but also a goddess. Hollick travels its length, exploring its mythology, ecology, economy, and the lives of the people who live along it, portraying a paradoxical relationship in which religious devotion goes hand in hand with increased ecological degradation and economic exploitation.

Cristina Eisenberg. The Wolf's Tooth: Keystone Predators, Trophic Cascades, and Biodiversity. (2010)

Based on her fieldwork with wolves and on research findings by other scientists around the world in recent decades, Eisenberg surveys the latest thinking on trophic cascades, or the effects created in an ecosystem when top-level predators or other keystone species are removed. Examples from Yellowstone, the Aleutian Islands, Amazon rain forests, and coral reefs show how such effects can be complex, wide-ranging, and unexpected with potentially catastrophic implications for local biodiversity. She also looks at how resource managers are using this knowledge to guide ecosystem recovery, including how it could be applied to move forward a vision of rewilding the North American continent.

Lane H. Kendig with Bret C. Keast. Community Character: Principles for Design and Planning. (2010)

The character of a community is what makes it unique, livable, and inviting. These elements can be difficult to define, yet are often what people want to preserve or to create when planning. Moving beyond simplistic measures of density and land use, the authors here provide a comprehensive system for planning and zoning communities that incorporates a wide range of measures to define character and that reflects the complexity of the interaction of the built environment with its social and economic functions.

Joe Romm. Straight Up: America's Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions. (2010)

Climate expert, physicist, former official in the U.S. Department of Energy, and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Joe Romm draws from his influential blog, ClimateProgress.org, to discuss climate science, clean energy solutions, global warming politics, and how the mainstream media have failed in their coverage of these issues. Proposing technological and other measures to reach a low-carbon, low-oil, low-net-material use economy, he argues that any efforts to avert catastrophic global warming will ultimately require citizen action to bring public pressure to bear on governments that have historically been reluctant to act.

New Books - May

New Books - May 2010

You've watched the video, you've told all of your friends and family members to watch the video, now you can read the book - The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard with Ariane Conrad. Leonard elaborates on her previous work to examine in greater depth the nature of our current patterns of production and consumption that are based on a belief in perpetual economic growth, and the critical challenges this system presents to the future of the global environment. Drawing on extensive research and on her personal experiences visiting the places around the world where "Stuff" is made and the dumps where it ends up, she illustrates the enormous and often hidden costs involved in the stages of today's material economy: extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal. She also details more signs of hope and examples of solutions, showing the practical ways people are working to make a safe, fair, and sustainable material economies at the local, national, and international levels.

Also...

Elizabeth Grossman. Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry. (2009)

Journalist Elizabeth Grossman (author of High Tech Trash) reports on the weak regulation of synthetic chemical materials and explains how they spread through our bodies and our environment thousands of miles from their sources with still unknown long-term effects. Her work illustrates the alternative potential for new developments in green chemistry to revolutionize the materials we make in order to bring about a healthier world.

Adam Kahane. Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change. (2010)

Based on his two decades of experience working around the world with teams of civil society, business, and government leaders to address challenges including food security, economic development, peacemaking, and climate change, Adam Kahane relates an approach to facilitating social change based on a balance between seemingly contradictory methods based on power - the desire to achieve one's purpose - and love - the drive to reconnect and unite with others. As Martin Luther King put it, “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

Michael Pollan. Food Rules: An Eater's Manual. (2009)

Michael Pollan returns with this concise guide for making eating less complicated. Critical of much of today's nutritional science, he starts with the bottom line "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" and elaborates a set of rules designed to help you move away from the typical Western diet to one based on eating real food in moderation.

Philip J. Dreyfus. Our Better Nature: Environment and the Making of San Francisco. (2008)

Cities and the people who live in them exist in complex relationships with the natural environment on which they depend. San Francisco State University professor Philip J. Dreyfus recounts the history of San Francisco, how the residents of the city remade the landscape around them, and how that history has reflected changes in humankind's understanding of our place in nature.

Jeff Chester. Digital Destiny: New Media and the Future of Democracy. (2007)

From the founder and executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, this book details how large media corporations with the help of lobbyists and pro-business policy makers have used their influence to shape regulation and increase their dominance over the Internet and other digital communication channels. Rather than an open and democratic landscape offering a variety of independent news, knowledge, and culture, the online world is in danger of coming under the control of a few media giants interested only in its commercial potential.

New Books - March 2010

When you hear “West Coast Lady,” “Golden Hairstreak,” or “Great Basin Wood Nymph” what do you think of? The rich and diverse population of butterflies in northern California, of course. And these are just a few of the many species covered in the comprehensive Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco and Sacramento Valley Regions by Arthur M. Shapiro and Timothy D. Manolis, number 92 in the California Natural History Guides series from the University of California Press. UC Press recently donated this book and others from the series to the library's collection, including:

Introduction to Air in California, by David Carle – Carle surveys all aspects of the air around us, how it has shaped life in the state, and how it has in turn been shaped by human activity both locally and globally. Find out why the sky is blue, why it gets so foggy around here, and why some regions are better for growing certain wines than others. It is also a useful guide for more environmentally conscious living, with information on alternative energy sources, regulatory regimes, and tips for cleaner running cars.

Introduction to Fire in California, by David Carle – Over eight million Californians live at risk near the edge of wildlands subject to periodic wildfires. This guide explores the nature of fire and its role in the structure and processes of native ecosystems throughout the state. It also examines how humans have responded to wildfires and lays out the challenges we need to face to realize our place as a fire-adapted species.

Geology of the San Francisco Bay Region, by Doris Sloan – How did the ocean floor get to the top of Twin Peaks? How far do you have to dig beneath your flowerbed in the Sunset District before you find some of the dune sand that once covered half of San Francisco? Such questions are answered in this guide to the diverse, complex, and dynamic geologic processes that have molded the Bay Area over millions of years. In addition to clearly explaining complex topics such as plate tectonics, it suggests places where you can go to explore and to see geology in action.

Also, our friends at the Columbia Foundation made a large donation of items to the collection recently, including:

It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street, by Nomi Prins – Former Goldman Sachs managing director and current senior fellow at Demos, Prins dissects the financial system, the financial disasters of 2008, and the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington that enabled the disastrous behavior of large investment banks.

Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry, by Evan Wolfson – The executive director of Freedom to Marry brings his experience as a civil rights litigator to bear on the legal issues surrounding same-sex marriage and demonstrates why the right to marry for all couples is important for America's promise of equality.

Food is Different: Why We Must Get the WTO out of Agriculture, by Peter M. Rosset - Global food and farming researcher-activist Peter Rosset's guide to how the WTO “free trade” regime and agricultural subsidies have created an unequal food system that benefits a small corporate elite, and to the alternatives being proposed by social movements around the world to protect food sovereignty.

And from an anonymous donor, a fascinating work of scientific journalism:

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot – Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old black mother when she died of cervical cancer in 1951. While treating her, doctors took tissue samples for research without her knowledge, and from these samples they began growing in culture the first viable line of “immortal” human cells, known as HeLa. HeLa cells have since been used extensively in many areas of scientific and medical research, aiding in the development of the polio vaccine, AIDS treatments, in vitro fertilization methods, and much more. The Lacks family, however, has derived no benefit from this use of her cells and today lack health insurance. Skloot tells the story of Henrietta, her family, and HeLa, illuminating the human side of issues of scientific ethics, race, poverty, privacy, and the sanctity of the human body.

New Books - December 2009

This month we are highlighting a few of the books that generous donors have added to the library collection in the past few months covering a variety of topics including climate change, multicultural history, green design, Web 2.0, genetic engineering, industrial agriculture, and the distribution of wealth. Join us at the Thoreau Center Craft Fair on Wednesday, December 9 from 11:30 to 1:30. Purchase a delicious homemade brownie and your donation will help us provide more library resources to serve your interests. And, if you have books sitting around your office or at home that you’d like to donate to the library, please do. The library can help circulate and share such resources with our Thoreau Center community.

Orrin H. Pilkey & Rob Young. The Rising Sea. (2009)

Geologists Orrin H. Pilkey and Rob Young examine the causes and effects of vanishing glaciers, melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, and retreating shorelines worldwide. While not immediately perceptible to all today, global warming is currently altering coastal environments and their human and biological communities, and scientists anticipate that its impacts on our densely developed shorelines will only become more catastrophic in the decades to come. The authors make the case for taking a long-term view and making the hard choices now needed to shape development in a direction more in harmony with nature.

Ronald Takaki. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Revised Edition). (2008)

The revised edition of Ronald Takaki's landmark study of the making of multicultural America, recounting the economic and political history of non-Anglo peoples of the United States: African Americans, Asian Americans, Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, Mexican Americans, Muslim Americans, and Native Americans. A complex and sobering examination of ethnic identity and the question of what it means to be an American, Takaki also brings to life the words, stories, and feelings of ordinary people through the use their folk songs, poetry, letters, and memoirs.

George M. Woodwell. The Nature of a House: Building a World that Works. (2009)

George M. Woodwell, founder and director of the Woods Hole Research Center, recounts the challenges faced by that organization as they transformed a nineteenth century mansion and its nine acres into their new office building and campus while staying true to their ecological principles by using "state-of-the-shelf" green building techniques and materials. For Woods Hole, it was the opportunity to demonstrate the transitions that need to be made in our thinking about how we design, reuse, and live in the built environment in response to the challenges of climate change and environmental degradation.

Claire Hope Cummings. Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds. (2008)

Focusing on the plight of seeds as the common heritage of all humanity, Cummings condemns the use of biotechnology in agriculture, arguing that the development of patented and genetically altered seeds perpetuates the ills of today's industrialized food system and undermines the autonomy of farmers, all within an inadequate regulatory framework that does little to ensure the safety of genetically engineered foods for the consumer. As the alternative, she presents the stories of local communities that are using organic farming and other methods to produce food and fuel sustainably while preserving and restoring the integrity of both natural and cultural systems.

David Bollier. Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own. (2008)

David Bollier is a journalist, activist, and public policy analyst as well as Editor of Onthecommons.org and cofounder of Public Knowledge. In this book, he has written a narrative history of the emergence over the past decade of the electronic "free culture" movement, an eclectic and global collection of techies, lawyers, artists, musicians, scientists, and businesspeople building a digital commons committed to freedom and innovation. In resistance to centalized control, hierarchies of credentialed experts, and draconian intellectual property rights, this movement has worked to create a radically different order based on open access, decentralized creativity, collaborative intelligence, and cheap and easy sharing.

Gar Alperovitz & Lew Daly. Unjust Deserts: How the Rich are Taking our Common Inheritance. (2008)

The distribution of income and wealth in the United States is more unequal today than at any time since the 1920s. In this examination of wealth creation, the authors argue that research demonstrates that much of the success of the wealthiest individuals in fact results from the unjust appropriation of inherited knowledge owned by society at large. They articulate a new political case for the redistribution of wealth, based on the understanding that the source of that wealth is society itself.