Every day, new books arrive in the offices of Utne Reader. It would be impossible to review all of them, but a shame to leave many hidden on the shelves. In "Bookmarked," we link to excerpts from some of our favorites, hoping they'll inspire a trip to your local library or bookstore. Enjoy! 

 The Blueprint (Corinno Press, 2012), by Daniel Rirdan, is a call to arms and an argument for his 15-year, worldwide plan that calls for major changes in the way we impact the planet. In his blueprint, Rirdan offers employable designs that lay down new paths for our economy, technology, industry and politics. Read an excerpt on understanding climate change taken from Chapter 1, “Climate Change: What’s In Store.”  

The neighborhood of Lakeview, New Orleans was a gem nestled in a poor and crime-ridden city. Geographically isolated from the rest of New Orleans, this neighborhood filled with educated professionals and generations of families was able to flourish. Despite Lakeview’s large size — 17,000 residents and 7,000 homes — the neighborhood formed a cohesive and strong community with the help of the Lakeview Civic Improvement Assocation. Residents even created their own special tax district in order to support a private neighborhood police force. Tom Wooten’s We Shall Not Be Moved provides a portrait of Lakeview, New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina and tells the story of how the citizens of five New Orleans neighborhoods rebuilt the city they loved. Read Chapter 1, “Very Much at Home.”

Though the events of 9/11 are almost a decade in the past, anti-Islamic sentiment burns strong in the United States and Europe. The summer of 2010 became the Summer of Hate as threats to burn the Qur’an, mosque protests and proposed anti-Islamic legislation blazed throughout the West. What could explain this spike in Islamophobia? In Crusade 2.0, author John Feffer examines the resurgence of anti-Islamic sentiment in the West and its global implications. Read the book’s introduction, “Target: Islam,” which defines Islamophobia, discusses the potential sources of its reappearance and outlines the three wars that continue to shape Western attitudes toward Islam: The Crusades, the Cold War and the Global War on Terrorism. 

Rachel Eddey (www.RachelEddey.com)  is a freelance writer in New York. Her first book, a humorous memoir entitled Running of the Bride: My Frenzied Quest to Tie the Knot, Tear Up the Dance Floor, and Figure Out Why My 15 Minutes of Fame Included Commercial Breaks , is now available. Join her on Twitter, Facebook, or at any dive bar in New York City. This essay was originally published in the Chicago Tribune (June 24, 2012), and shares how her struggle to find an editor for that book coincided with her father's heart attack and emergency sextuple bypass surgery.

  

In May 2011, I had a good reason to be in Dublin: I was mad about life in New York and trying to escape. I had written a memoir three years earlier and couldn’t find a publisher. Four failed agents, a handful of opportunities inches away from my grasping hand, and countless margaritas later, I was burnt out. At 29, I contemplated retirement.

I wasn’t only disappointing myself. My dad, Lawrence J. Epstein, has always been my mentor and biggest cheerleader. A retired English professor who has published ten books on subjects ranging from comedy teams to folk singers to Jewish affairs, he and I often spent hours talking shop. Though I’d had some success with newspaper and magazine publishing, a book contract for me was our shared goal. We had been waiting for this moment my entire adult life. I felt like I was disappointing him, too.

Five days into my soul-searching trip, my mother-in-law called my hotel room—at 3am—to say that my then 64-year-old, previously healthy father had suffered a heart attack and needed emergency sextuple bypass surgery. Ireland was 3,150 miles from my dad’s Long Island hospital bed. I changed my flight, packed my bags, and cried the entire seven-hour trip home. It didn’t help that when the plane landed, the only message I had was from a friend announcing her brother's death.

I stopped at my parents' house on the way to the hospital to drop off my suitcase. The car was still rumbling in the driveway when my Blackberry pinged. I was annoyed at the interruption—a far preferable mood, admittedly, to the sheer, unequivocal terror that had been gripping my insides since I’d left the hotel. Cue a this-never-happens-in-real-life moment: It was from my dream editor. And he was offering a book contract.

An internal cloud covered me. Selling a book was the first step in a much longer process. I would have to go through rounds of edits and get magazines to review it and write a stump speech and schedule myself on radio shows and take countless other measures I couldn’t yet define. This wasn’t a battle I had entered alone and it wasn’t one I wanted to finish alone. But here I was, about to head to the hospital, unsure whether my father was even alive. I did the only thing I could think to do. I got back in the car.

The ICU frightened me. So did my dad. I pretended like the oxygen mask over his mouth didn’t exist. His arms were black and blue from countless needles that had prodded his veins before the surgery. I pretended those marks weren’t there, either. I focused instead on his short, gray hair, the only part of him that seemed untouched. He wouldn't be able to speak, the nurse told me. But he could hear. I fussed with his pillows as he stirred awake.

I could only have a few lines after a hello. I knew just what they were going to be.

“Dad, I’ve got exciting news,” I told him, gently squeezing his hand. “I sold my book!” My long-standing idea of how this moment would go down—screams and laughter and a Carvel ice-cream cake—gave way to a new reality. My dad's eyes bulged, the only movement his groggy body allowed. They stayed wide as I relayed the details of the contract and expected publication date, then slowly faded into slits and disappeared behind closed lids. I’m positive it took all his energy, but he squeezed my hand back before falling asleep.

The doctors released him to me and my mom 10 days later. The depression they had warned us about in hushed tones never came, but complications did. Two months after the surgery, still frail and cloudy, my father fainted twice—both attributable to rapid atrial fibrillation (increased heart rate) and pleural effusion (fluid around the lungs). An ambulance brought him back to the hospital.

I came to his room once he was stable. Short of sneaking him an extra Vicodin (don’t arrest me—I refrained), there was only one way I knew to help. I pulled out the newest version of my manuscript.

My dad reached for it the moment he was well enough to sit up. He juggled a carton of applesauce and a red pen, inking notes in the margins as he interacted with nurses and swallowed pills. His five-day stay went by in spurts of talking with me about my contract, scrolling through the publisher’s website, and compiling—from memory—a list of marketing books he wanted me to read. 

Two more pleural effusions followed and my dad was re-admitted each time. The hospital  became our office; our work day, the visiting hours. He ordained his top dresser drawer, in which we stored pens and notebooks and sticky-notes, as “book supplies.” We used medical tape to secure diagrams and spreadsheets to the wall. Him on his bed and me in a worn wooden chair, we worked together on a publicity plan, drafted talking points, and designed business cards. He coached me on how to decode reviews, the best approaches to a launch party, and why I needed to revamp my social media approach. (Seriously. The man has more Facebook friends than I do.) Eventually, the nurses began bringing me applesauce, too.

My father turned to look at me as he signed the release papers on what would become his last (we hope) surgery-related hospital stay.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for needing me.”

Helping him walk to the waiting car, I understood. Illness is a time when people consciously consider what is important in their lives. He saw a purpose he had not finished fulfilling, and he used that as a safety rope. I know, of course, that it wasn’t my book itself that saved him; it was his will to let the book save him. My dependency stood as a microcosm for all he still wanted to do and all the hope he had for doing it.

I sat him in the passenger seat and shut the door. Though I’d had a good reason to be in Dublin, I had an even better reason to be home.

Image courtesy ofmuffet, licensed under Creative Commons.  

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Every day, new books arrive in the offices of Utne Reader. It would be impossible to review all of them, but a shame to leave many hidden on the shelves. In "Bookmarked," we link to excerpts from some of our favorites, hoping they'll inspire a trip to your local library or bookstore. Bonne connaissance!

Pioneering food activist John Robbins’ provocative observations about food politics and eating more consciously have inspired a generation to reexamine what’s on their plates and embrace a healthier organic diet. No Happy Cows: Dispatches from the from the Frontlines of the Food Revolution (Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC, 2012) is a collection of his most widely discussed and circulated Huffington Post columns, along with some important new writing. Topics include whether soy is healthy or harmful, the marketing of junk food to children, health implications of chocolate and coffee, the rise of obesity in America, and the relationship between animals and the humans who raise them. Read the book’s introduction.
 

In The Land Grabbers (Beacon Press, 2012), Fred Pearce travels across the globe to investigate the growing trend of land grabbing, detailing how foreign investors are purchasing or leasing substantial plots of land in developing countries in order to produce and secure goods (such as food and biofuels) for their own uses. In doing so, Pearce uncovers some of the most profound ethical, environmental, economic, and social issues in the world today. This book explores how the world’s richest countries, corporations, and individuals are buying up our hungry, crowded world. Read Chapter 2, “Chicago, U.S.A.: The Price of Food.”  

Quantum physics prompted even Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman to admit, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” Although it encompasses everything from how a ball moves through the air to how trees create oxygen, from how a computer’s circuit board functions to the life cycle of a star, understanding quantum physics means disregarding everyday perceptions of how the world works. Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw shed a little light on how the universe as we know it behaves in The Quantum Universe (And Why Anything That Can Happen, Does) (Da Cappo Press, 2011). Read the first chapter, “Something Strange Is Afoot.” 

Every day, new books arrive in the offices of Utne Reader. It would be impossible to review all of them, but a shame to leave many hidden on the shelves. In "Bookmarked," we link to excerpts from some of our favorites, hoping they'll inspire a trip to your local library or bookstore. Bonne connaissance!

India is a country famous for delectable curries smelling of turmeric and cardamom, colorful saris, dazzling Hindu Temples peppering every corner and busy streets bustling with a mixture of rickshaws, motorcycles and wandering cows. It is also known for its “geeks,” according to Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking Over the World (Hodder & Stoughton, dist. by Trafalgar Square Publishing from IPG, 2012) by science journalist Angela Saini. This fascinating exploration delves inside the psyche of the nation’s science-hungry citizens, explaining how ancient science is giving way to new, and how the technology of the wealthy is being passed on to the poor. Read the book’s introduction to learn how the Indian space program helped India evolve into the world’s next scientific superpower.

 

This article originally appeared at Chronicle.com. 

It begins when you read a piece of literature that reminds you why we read literature: an essay with sentences you wish you had written, a poem you receive like a gift, a novel that self-helps you better than any self-help book. You find yourself writing in the margin, using symbols that embarrass you (exclamation points!), scribbling YES!, and making stars, asterisks, and vertical lines to mark passages that you read and reread and read again aloud. With urgency and heat, you underline and highlight.

You elbow room for the work in the syllabus. You adjust the whole course to accommodate that one piece of writing. You can't wait to assign it to students. It will change their lives. They will love you for this.

Then comes the day. You wait for the class to weigh in. You wait to hear from the student who always get it, the one you count on to point out what others have missed, who serves as a proxy for you and often leads the class. You wait to hear from the passionate reader whose mind, free from the itchy constraints of critical analysis, always finds something to like about a piece. You wait to hear from the student whose spoken language is tortured by notions of what he thinks sounds smart; usually you can barely figure out what he is trying to say, but that doesn't stop him from going on about how much he got out of the reading. And you wait for the slacker who comes to class having no more than skimmed the assignment, yet who manages to say something, often funny, sometimes intentionally.

Then you notice they are all looking at their notebooks, fondling their iPads, doing anything else they can think of to avoid looking at you, with your face all kid-happy. Because they know that they are going to disappoint you. And then they do.

It was OK, one of them says.

It was too long.

I didn't get it.

I thought it was boring, the slacker says.

The class leader claims it was sentimental, flawed.

The sentimental girl—the one who always finds something to love in a piece of writing—checks that her pen is still healthy and won't make eye contact.

The work that induced that reaction six times, in graduate and undergraduate courses, at two universities and one medium-security prison, was an essay by the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, Red Sox fan, Renaissance scholar, president of Yale University, president of the National League, commissioner of baseball, firer of Pete Rose, swarthy smoker of cigarettes, and eloquent reader of texts, who died of a heart attack at age 51. Written when he was 40, the essay, called "The Green Fields of the Mind," begins: "It breaks your heart. It was designed to break your heart."

He continued: "There comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight."

In class I ask: What is the essay about? Students understand that it's about the ways that baseball helps us to live, the immersion in the immediate, the appeal of illusions of something everlasting. It is not that they do not get it. They get it. This is not like when I ask them to read something challenging and complex, and their distaste comes from intimidation. With difficult texts, after we discuss them in class, they often see what they had missed and, in retrospect, come not only to admire but to like the work.

At first I thought the problem was that the students were too young, or that they hated sports, or that they were plain stupid. But no. My students just tend not to cotton to Giamatti's flavor of sweetness. He ends the essay with this comment on those who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts: "These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun."

I love this essay. My students do not.

Read the rest at Chronicle.com. 

Image by Abraham Pisarek, 1948, licensed under Creative Commons by Deutsche Fotothek. 

Every day, new books arrive in the offices of Utne Reader. It would be impossible to review all of them, but a shame to leave many hidden on the shelves. In "Bookmarked," we link to excerpts from some of our favorites, hoping they'll inspire a trip to your local library or bookstore. Bonne connaissance! 

 

Transform problems into opportunities; set yourself free from fear and anxiety; unburden yourself of past resentment; create an action plan for true happiness. In A Spiritual Renegade’s Guide to the Good Life (Atria Books/Beyond Words Publishing, 2012), Lama Marut voices the next generation of spiritualism by addressing today’s need for fearless honesty, practicality and simplicity, and offering meditations and action plans designed to incite true, unpackaged happiness. Read Chapter 1, “Burning With Desire: Consumerism and Its Alternative—Radical Contentment.” 

 Seed varieties have declined significantly since the beginning of time, and even more so with plant domestication. World blight may come upon us if we continue to depend on limited varieties of corn, soy and wheat. This excerpt from The Seed Underground (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012) by Janisse Ray covers a brief history of seeds and how we must diversify our crops with heirloom and vintage seed varieties in order to increase agrodiversity and protect the health of Mother Earth. Read Chapter 1, “More Gardens, Less Gas.”
 

Executives, investors and the business press routinely chant the mantra that corporations are required to “maximize shareholder value.” In The Shareholder Value Myth (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012), renowned corporate expert Lynn Stout debunks the myth that corporate law mandates shareholder primacy. Stout shows how shareholder value thinking endangers not only investors but the rest of us as well. Read the book’s introduction, “The Dumbest Idea in the World.”  

When President Barack Obama ordered the surge of troops and aid to Afghanistan, Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran followed. He found the effort sabotaged not only by Afghan and Pakistani malfeasance but by infighting and incompetence within the American government: a war cabinet arrested by vicious bickering among top national security aides; diplomats and aid workers who failed to deliver on their grand promises; generals who dispatched troops to the wrong places; and headstrong military leaders who sought a far more expansive campaign than the White House wanted. In Little America (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), Chandrasekaran discusses the war in Afghanistan and explains how the United States has never understood Afghanistan—and probably never will. Read the prologue. 

We know what we want the world to be like in 40 years. We know what the world could be like in 40 years if we all did what needs to be done to create a more sustainable future. But what do we know about what the world will actually be like in 40 years? This is the question Jorgen Randers tries to answer in 2052 (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012). Randers' glimpse of the future asks: How many people will the planet need to support? Will there be enough food and energy? Will the young revolt under the debt and pension burden of the old? Which nations will prosper and which will suffer? And several more pressing questions. Read Chapter 1, “Worrying About the Future.”