Seven Book Picks From Our Readers

Our web visitors and email activists weigh in

Posted: 22-Jun-2006; Updated: 15-May-2007

• Read our staff picks
• Email these to friends
• See last year's list
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After publishing our list of Staff Picks for Summer Reading, we invited you, our readers, to send in your favorite environmental tomes. As promised, here are some of your recommendations.

Thanks for stuffing our inbox with some good book ideas for the beach and the trail! Keep the feedback and recommendations coming!

Three fiction recommendations

A Cafecito Story
By Julia Alverez

Recommended by:
Carlos from Union City, NJ

I recommend A Cafecito Story because it describes Julia Alverez's experience in helping community members do sustainable agriculture in the northeastern area of the Dominican Republic. The campesino program for coffee-planting is a model for sustainability and biodiversity protection in developing countries.

The Highest Tide
By Jim Lynch

Recommended by:
Jim, a librarian in favor of novels, from Chico, CA!

A coming of age story set on the tide flats of the Salish Sea (a.k.a. Puget sound) about a young man with unusual scientific skills and intuition. Along with environmental themes, Lynch deals with the religious cults and America's fascination with celebrities.

Oryx and Crake
By Margaret Atwood

Recommended by:
Jennifer from Owings Mills, MD

Atwood visits the future with a look at runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, which has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. You get bits and pieces of what happened revealed to you gradually as the book progresses. It is science fiction and a cautionary tale.  It is riveting!

Four nonfiction recommendations

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By Jared Diamond

Recommended by:
Greg from Santa Clara, CA

Covering social, political, environmental problems created by past and present groups from Norse Greenland, Iceland, Easter Island to modern Haiti, Australia, Montana and New Guinea, the book offers us hope for the future by reviewing what went right and what went very wrong within these failed and successful groups.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
By Janisse Ray

Recommended by:
Doug, Environmental Defense staffer from Raleigh, NC

In Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, author Janisse Ray makes an elegantly crafted and impassioned plea for the restoration of the once-mighty longleaf pine forest of the South. Ray presents in spare prose the story of her personal love affair with wiregrass, red-cockaded woodpeckers and indigo snakes, and the challenges that must be surmounted to breathe life into this now-rare ecosystem. The longleaf forest was the setting for the birthing of the "safe harbor" concept by Environmental Defense staff, now saving important species all over America.

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
By Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins

Recommended by:
Jen, Ideal Bite co-founder from Bozeman, MT

Provides a comprehensive, systematic and well-documented case and roadmap for the challenge raised by its subtitle.

Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good
By Jonathan Balcombe

Recommended by:
Tracy from Ossining, NY

The author is a research scientist with Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. It's fascinating. Totally gives us a new understanding of our kinship with the animal world.

Related links:
• Email these to friends
• Read our staff reviews
• Check out last summer's list
• Send us your book suggestions