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To purchase one of these great books, click the "buy it" button, which will take you to Amazon.com. Put the book in your shopping cart right away -- before browsing -- and NRDC will get up to 15% of the price! |
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 our favorites
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This Fine Piece of Water
An Environmental History of Long Island Sound by Tom Andersen Tom Andersen draws upon three centuries of history to tell the story of the Long Island Sound, a body of water that Daniel Webster once called the "American Mediterranean." What emerges is a tale of decades of neglect and environmental degradation that eventually resulted in a serious ecological crisis. -- SEE THE ONEARTH REVIEW  hardcover (ISBN: 0300082509)
paperback (ISBN: 0300102879)
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 The Riverkeepers
Two Activists Fight to Reclaim our Environment as a Basic Human Right by John Cronin & Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In 1983, John Cronin was appointed Hudson Riverkeeper, and one year later, Kennedy, now a senior attorney for NRDC, joined as Chief Prosecuting Attorney. Their job: to track down the river's polluters. Since then, they have waged battles against polluters ranging from private clubs and multi-national corporations to government agencies. The book is a collection of "war stories" -- tales from the frontlines of a struggle to clean up a damaged environment. Written with candor, passion and insight, this engaging volume reveals the struggles facing any environmental movement -- whether local or national -- and the attitudes, enemies and forces that so often work behind closed doors to thwart the expressed interests of the general public. -- STANLEY YOUNG paperback (ISBN: 068484625X)
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Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth
by Richard Fortey An intelligent, literate and accessible story of life on planet Earth from the times of the earliest congealing of carbon molecules to the rise of our immediate ancestors. Told by a paleontologist (head of the Department of Paleontology of the British Museum) who deftly weaves personal anecdotes and mind-stretching analogies into a fascinating and quirky history that is anything but dry. -- ADAM ALBRIGHT paperback (ISBN: 037570261X)
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A Civil Action
by Jonathan Harr A gripping true story of David vs. Goliath, this book is part courtroom drama, part mystery, and part human tragedy. Children in a Massachusetts town are struck down by leukemia, and toxic contaminants dumped into the water may be responsible. A public interest attorney allies with the townspeople to hold two powerful corporations responsible. This is like a fast-paced, suspenseful John Grisham novel with a public health conscience. -- GINA SOLOMON paperback (ISBN: 0679772677)
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Five Past Midnight in Bhopal
The Epic Story of the World's Deadliest Industrial Disaster by Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro A detailed examination of the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal -- which to date has been linked to the deaths of 20,000 to 30,000 people -- through the stories of those involved, from Union Carbide CEO Warren Andersen to Padmini Nadar, a slum dweller whose wedding festivities were underway when an explosion at the plant released huge quantities of poisonous gas. Lapierre and Moro's gripping narrative starts a few years before the disaster, when Padmini's family moved to Bhopal after their village farm was invaded by aphids, and goes on to describe in brutal detail how bottom-line business calculations and feeble national regulations spawned a tragedy that is still taking its toll decades later. -- SEE THE ONEARTH REVIEW
hardcover (ISBN: 0446530883)
paperback (ISBN: 0446690783)
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King of Fish
The Thousand Year Run of Salmon by David R. Montgomery Salmon once reigned over some of the world's most storied rivers: Three hundred years ago, there were regular salmon runs on the Thames and Rhine, and in the northeastern United States, the fish were so abundant they were used as fertilizer. Overfishing, dam building, pollution, and ineffectual efforts to regulate all three have doomed salmon before just as, Montgomery warns, they threaten to doom remaining populations now. An engaging, well-researched look at one of the world's most regal species of fish. -- SEE THE ONEARTH REVIEW paperback (ISBN: 0813342996)
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Where Vultures Feast
Shell, Human Rights, and Oil in the Niger Delta by Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas Two Nigerian writers offer an in-depth account of the destructive exploitation of their country's oil resources by Royal Dutch/Shell, amply aided in its efforts by successive military dictatorships. While the background information on the oil industry and Nigerian politics can be daunting, the chapter on Ken Saro-Wiwa's ill-fated struggle against these forces is painfully vivid. Saro-Wiwa was put to death by the Nigerian government in 1995. -- SEE THE ONEARTH REVIEW
hardcover (ISBN: 1578050464)
paperback (ISBN: 1859844731)
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The Age of Science
What Scientists Learned in the Twentieth Century by Gerard Piel Gerard Piel, the founding editor of Scientific American, started his career with a degree in history, which prepared him admirably to be a "spectator at the inquiry after knowledge." His eminently accessible survey of the achievements of the second half of the twentieth century is an astonishingly erudite work of explanatory journalism that is never ponderous. -- SEE THE ONEARTH REVIEW
hardcover (ISBN: 0465057551)
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