Dave's Picks, Part 2: What's The Deal With Fuel?
The Long Emergencyby James Howard Kunstler
The global oil predicament, climate change, and other shocks to the system, with implications for how we will live in the decades ahead. First published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in April 2005. Paperback published in April 2006.
"What sets The Long Emergency apart from numerous other books on this theme is its comprehensive sweep — its powerful integration of science, technology, economics, finance, international politics and social change — along with a fascinating attempt to peer into a chaotic future. And Kunstler is such a compelling, fast-paced and sometimes eloquent writer that the book is hard to put down."
--David Ehrenfeld
The American Scientist
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How To Live Well Without Owning A Carby Chris Balish
Despite what $20 billion of automobile advertising every year would have us all believe, buying or leasing a car, truck, or SUV is the worst financial move most people make in their lifetime. And they make this mistake again and again, at a cost of literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. High gas prices, car payments, insurance, depreciation, parking, repairs, maintenance, and nearly one hundred other expenses add up so quickly and silently that most car owners don't even notice -- they just see how little money they have left at the end of the month and wonder why. Cars devour cash, increase debt, reduce savings, and make financial freedom difficult to achieve.
How To Live Well Without Owning A Car suggests taking a different path -- a car-free path. The program in this book will show you how to live a full, active life without owning a car. And without a car to pay for, practically anyone can get out of debt, save money, and even achieve financial freedom. The truth is that tens of millions of working Americans do not need to own a car.
Living car-free in America is not difficult, but it does require some mild lifestyle changes. This book will walk you through the process step by step. The strategies in this book will help put you on the car-free path to financial freedom; or, if you do not wish to get rid of your car entirely, they'll help you save money by using your car less. So even if living "car-free" isn't your style, this book can show you how to live happily "car-lite."
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Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternativesby Edwin Black
Internal Combustion is the compelling tale of corruption and manipulation that subjected the U.S. and the world to an oil addiction that could have been avoided, that was never necessary, and that could be ended not in ten years, not in five years, but today.
Edwin Black, award-winning author of IBM and the Holocaust, has mined scores of corporate and governmental archives to assemble thousands of previously uncovered and long-forgotten documents and studies into this dramatic story. Black traces a continuum of rapacious energy cartels and special interests dating back nearly 5,000 years, from wood to coal to oil, and then to the bicycle and electric battery cartels of the 1890s, which created thousands of electric vehicles that plied American streets a century ago. But those noiseless and clean cars were scuttled by petroleum interests, despite the little-known efforts of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford to mass-produce electric cars powered by personal backyard energy stations. Black also documents how General Motors criminally conspired to undermine mass transit in dozens of cities and how Big Oil, Big Corn, and Big Coal have subverted synthetic fuels and other alternatives.
He then brings the story full-circle to the present day oil crises, global warming and beyond. Black showcases overlooked compressed-gas, electric and hydrogen cars on the market today, as well as inexpensive all-function home energy units that could eliminate much oil usage. His eye-opening call for a Manhattan Project for immediate energy independence will help energize society to finally take action.
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The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asiaby Lutz Kleveman
In The New Great Game, Lutz Kleveman gives us a fearless, insightful and exacting portrait of a new battleground in the violent politics and passion of oil: Central Asia, known as the "black hole of the earth" for much of the last century. The Caspian Sea contains the world’s largest amount of untapped oil and gas resources. It is estimated that there might be as much as one hundred billion barrels of crude oil in the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan alone.
Desperate to wean its dependence on the powerful OPEC cartel, the United States is pitted in this struggle against Russia, China, and Iran, all competing to dominate the Caspian region, its resources and pipeline routes. Complicating the playing field are transnational energy corporations with their own agendas and the brash new, Wild West-style entrepreneurs who have taken control after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Traveling thousands of miles, from the Caucasus peaks across the Central Asian plains down to the Afghan Hindu Kush, Kleveman met with the principal Great Game actors between Kabul and Moscow: oil barons, generals, diplomats, and warlords.
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The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New Worldby Paul Roberts
The End of Oil is a "geologic cautionary tale for a complacent world accustomed to reliable infusions of cheap energy." The book centers around one irrefutable fact: the global supply of oil is being depleted at an alarming rate. Precisely how much accessible (not to mention theoretical) oil remains is debatable, but even conservative estimates mark the peak of production in decades rather than centuries. Which energy sources will replace oil, who will control them, and how disruptive to the current world order the transition from one system to the next will be are just a few of the big questions that Paul Roberts attempts to answer in this timely book.
As Roberts makes abundantly clear, the major oil players in the world wield their enormous economic and political power in order to maintain the status quo. Of course, they get plenty of help from the tens of millions of consumers, particularly in the U.S. and Europe, who guzzle oil as if there is an unlimited supply. And this demand shows no sign of abating--nearly half of the world's population lives without the benefits of fossil fuels and they desperately want to be among the haves. In countries such as China and India, where energy systems are already breaking down, Roberts discusses how they are looking to oil to fuel their race for development, in many cases ignoring environmental considerations altogether.
Though there is much to be pessimistic about, Roberts does uncover some positive developments, such as the race for alternative energy sources, notably hydrogen fuel cells, which could help to ease us off of our oil dependence before a full-blown energy crisis occurs. No one book could cover every aspect of what Roberts calls "arguably the most serious crisis ever to face industrial society," but The End of Oil is a remarkably informative and balanced introduction to this pressing subject.
--Shawn Carkonen
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The Prizeby Daniel Yergin
The Prize, written by Daniel Yergin in 1991, tells the history of the oil industry from its early beginnings in 1850s to recent times. Oil has driven the modern world to such an extent that it would not be unreasonable to call the 20th century, the oil century.
Inventions and techniques tend to feed on one another to advance human knowledge, while technology alters societies to a far greater extent than ‘philosophy’. However, without the vast free input from the bank accounts of fossil fuels, built up over hundreds of millions of years, it would be far harder to drive forward a modern civilisation.
What is fascinating in reading Yergin’s book is the extreme extent to which political history and wars during the 20th century have been driven by considerations of oil: attempts to grab oilfields, the Western dependence on American oil production (which oilfields are now greatly depleted).
To understand the Oil Century, it is essential to grasp that oil is not just a means of energy, it is also an essential driver of political power. Without a secure oil supply, nations cannot long sustain military action, or defense. Consequently, serious wars have revolved around controlling oil, or depriving rivals of supply.
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Posted Friday, June 20, 2008
Dave's Picks: Summer 2008
Vanishing Americaby Michael Eastman
Michael Eastman's new book entitled Vanishing America, documents the decaying and often-abandoned towns, structures, and places in America’s back alley. Traveling across the country in search for subjects, Michael has finished this collection off with stunning photographs of forgotten America.
Think of the quirky buildings you pass every day but whose quiet beauty you take for granted: the movie houses, juke joints, soda fountains, barbershops, roadside diners, and storefront churches. You don't miss them until they're gone. As suburban sprawl and strip malls conquer the country, these vestiges of a lost way of life are falling under the wrecking ball. Here the photographer Michael Eastman has made the ultimate road trip, crisscrossing the nation dozens of times, to capture these buildings on film before they vanish.
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A People's History of American Empireby Howard Zinn
"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of a cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness." - Howard Zinn
Since its landmark publication in 1980, A People's History of the United States has had six new editions, sold more than 1.7 million copies, become required classroom reading throughout the country, and been turned into an acclaimed play. More than a successful book, A People's History triggered a revolution in the way history is told, displacing the official versions with their emphasis on great men in high places to chronicle events as they were lived, from the bottom up.
This version opens with the events of 9/11 and then jumps back to explore the cycles of U.S. expansionism from Wounded Knee to Iraq, stopping along the way at World War I, Central America, Vietnam, and the Iranian revolution. The book also follows the story of Zinn, the son of poor Jewish immigrants, from his childhood in the Brooklyn slums to his role as one of America's leading historians.
Shifting from world-shattering events to one family's small revolutions, A People's History of American Empire presents the classic ground-level history of America in a dazzling new form.
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The Man with the Golden Arm: 50th Anniversary Critical Editionby Nelson Algren
Seven Stories Press is proud to release the first critical edition of Nelson Algren's
masterpiece on the 50th anniversary of its publication in November 1949. Considered
Algren's finest work, The Man with the Golden Arm recounts one man's self-destruction in Chicago's Polish ghetto. The novel's protagonist, Frankie Machine, remains a tragic American hero half a century after Algren created this gritty and relentlessly dark tale of modern urban society.
Nelson Algren (1909-1981) wrote of the despised urban underbelly of America before it was fashionable to do so, and still stands as one of our most defiant and enduring novelists. His novels include The Man with the Golden Arm, winner of the first National Book Award, A Walk on the Wild Side, and Never Come Morning.
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The New Granta Book of the American Short Storyed. by Richard Ford
A fine story writer himself, Ford has also done his best to encourage us to read more of the genre he describes as "a streamlined little verbal torpedo". In 1990, he chose 20 for the annual Best American Short Stories; in 1992, he recommended another 39 for the first Granta Book of the American Short Story; in 1998, picked 11 for The Granta Book of the American Long Story; and here he is again with an entirely new selection of 44.
The stories that Ford picks are all about consequence. They're about moments, and places, outside the normal run of things - turning points in lives that occur, often rather casually, and sometimes unnoticed for years, when routines are broken.
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Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraqby Patrick Cockburn
When it comes to the cat's cradle of Iraqi sects, tribes, families, ethnicities, parties, regions and seemingly eternal animosities, there is hardly a better candidate for teasing apart those crisscrossing threads than Patrick Cockburn. The Iraq correspondent for The Independent in London, he has been visiting Iraq since 1977 and has written two previous books on the country. Cockburn lives up to those credentials in his important new book, Muqtada, which goes a long way toward helping us understand the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr by following his family through the modern history of Iraq. In late March, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki threw nearly 40,000 Iraqi Army and police forces, backed by American air support, into an assault on the southern city of Basra, figuring it would take him a few days to smash the Shiite militias in control of many of the city's neighborhoods. Instead, the Mahdi Army, the militia led by Moktada, initially fought the government to a standstill.
In telling this story, Cockburn argues that early descriptions of Moktada as some mix of Mafia don, opportunistic thug and renegade holy man had it wrong. No one disputes that Moktada draws much of his support from the poor and the rampantly unemployed lower classes, and that many of the young males who fill the ranks of the Mahdi Army are among the most not-nice people in Iraq. But Cockburn argues that Moktada had the chance to muster that support because he was clever enough to stay alive under Hussein and become his family's representative to the people after the death of his father and two brothers, who were killed by Hussein in 1999.
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Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards: Memoirs of a Rock 'n' Roll Survivorby Al Kooper
Twice republished – the original hit in 1977 as Backstage Passes: Rock & Roll Life in the Sixties and again in 1998 with its current title – Al Kooper's tell-all memoir is a fitting display of humor and knowledge from a fair-to-middlin' guitar player famous for stumbling his way through Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited sessions on a Hammond B-3 organ. Yes, that's him an eighth note behind on the chord changes of "Like a Rolling Stone," and later laying down the French horn intro to the Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Over a 45-year period, the gangly, shaggy-haired kid from New York somehow found himself in the thick of rock & roll's headlines, forming (and getting summarily booted out of) Blood, Sweat & Tears, introducing Joni Mitchell to Judy Collins, and producing the first three Skynyrd albums. He even had a stint in Austin. All the while, Kooper stays consistently hilarious and perfectly self-deprecating about the strokes of luck he was repeatedly handed, all the women and drugs (insomnia kept the coke at bay), and the turbulent lifestyle tied to those with a full-on devotion to rock & roll. Beware of wayward puns.
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