I was at the used book store yesterday and just happened to find a book by S.M. Stirling (http://www.amazon.com/Dies-Fire-Change-S-M-Stirling/dp/0451460413/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200153765&sr=1-3). Turns out there's a whole series of them and they are set in a world without cars. Kind of a post apocalyptic survivalist thing, but so far very well done. I picked it up because there is a bicycle on the cover art. I just started it, but already it seems like its going to be pretty good.

New book out by James Howard Kunstler, for those of you who read the Long Emergency... should be a great read. I have it requested at my library.

http://books.google.com/books?id=sLwZGQAACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&sig=iXtOpadnsJWd_kMogs1vlSSDTzA

In his previous book, celebrated social commentator James Howard Kunstler explored how the age of globalization and mankind's explosive progress over the last two hundred years was based on the availability of cheap fossil fuels. He observed that the terminal decline of oil production, combined with the perils of climate change, had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business. Offering a shocking vision for the coming trauma of our post-oil future, The Long Emergency was a tremendous success and a best seller, selling over 100,000 copies. With World Made by Hand, an astonishing work of speculative fiction, Kunstler makes an imaginative leap into the future, a few decades hence, and shows us what life may be like following the long emergency. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is not what they thought it would be. After the catastrophes converged--the end of oil, climate change, global pandemics, and resource wars--they are doing whatever they can to get by. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren't sure. As the heat of summer intensifies our narrator, Robert Earle, former marketing executive turned carpenter, and his fellow residents of Union Grove struggle with the new way of life. Their challenges play out in a dazzling, fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers replenished with fish. Driven by realistic conflicts and peopled with relatable, engaging characters, World Made by Hand is a novel full of love and loss, violence and power, sex and drugs, depression and desperation, but also plenty of hope. This is an extraordinary book, sure to appeal to Kunstler's legion of fans as well as new readers attracted by the accomplished storytelling of an experienced writer.

I read a good book called "better off" by Eric Brende....pretty inspiring...check it out!

http://www.amazon.com/Better-Off-Flipping-Switch-Technology/dp/0060570040

I read a good book called "better off" by Eric Brende....pretty inspiring...check it out!

http://www.amazon.com/Better-Off-Flipping-Switch-Technology/dp/0060570040

Thanks. It looks like a pretty good read. And my library has a copy!
Left MIT to live without a laptop? :D

A couple off-topic ones:

The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon. A noir detective book, set in an alternate world where Jews have created a big Yiddish city in Sitka, Alaska. Great characters. Humor and pathos. A topheavy plot. Some of the best prose writing of the decade.

The Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Jacobs. A New York writers attempt to follow the Old and New Testaments as literally as possible for one year. A humorous and thought provoking discussion of religion in 21st Century America.

I'm working my way through In Defense of Food. I recommend it to anyone and everyone, but I think people in the lcf forum will especially like it.
I'll tell y'all more about it after I've finished!http://images.booksense.com/images/0/14/55/9781594201455.jpg

I just finished The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas (http://books.google.com/books?id=3Papno2RcNYC&dq=the+living+great+lakes&pg=PP1&ots=i9RQeTwc4p&sig=R2rIZe6ZD2zoPkPJQOGQ-9yNWTg&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=the+living+great+lakes&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail#PPP1,M1) by Jerry Dennis.

The author traveled on the schooner Malabar when it was delivered from Traverse City, MI to Bar Harbor, ME. He uses the journey as a narrative framework for information about the ecology, history and natural history of the Great Lakes. An excellent book if you're interested in the Great Lakes.

I have recently enjoyed several of the position stands published free online (http://www.ms-se.com/pt/re/msse/positionstandards.htm;jsessionid=Hvhc5xsQc1Gl9QQrJ9n0JvC1Y2546vT4qLGB7FvYz1vJy5ZwdC8h!-1108188142!181195628!8091!-1) by the American College of Sports Medicine. They're not books, but journal articles with very useful information for transportation cyclists. These are peer reviewed studies, so you don't get the fads and dubious anecdotes about exercise and nutrition.

I read about how cycling and exercise influences heart disease, blood pressure and weight loss. There are great articles on preventing both cold injuries and heat illnesses. And the article on progressive resistance training is the best resource I know of if you lift weights.

I've been reading Lolita by Nabokov. It's pretty bizarre, but I enjoy his writing style. I'd recommend it to open-minded readers.

+1

Also, if you have the time and the patience, read Joyce's Ulysses. Ahh...the minutiae of working class Dubliners!

I just finished two more books, both off topic and both interesting.


Hominids (http://www.sfwriter.com/exho.htm) by Robert J. Sawyer. A SF novel about a bridge between our world and a parallel world where Neanderthals are the dominant species and H. Sapiens is extinct. Very interesting, well written, winner of several SF awards.

The Bush Tragedy (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/01/18/ST2008011801413.html) by Jacob Weisberg. How the Bush family drama led to the US invasion of Iraq and the horrendous botch-up of the occupation. Well researched, it manages to avoid most of the hokey curbside psychologizing you'd expect in a book like this.

I read a good book called "better off" by Eric Brende....pretty inspiring...check it out!

http://www.amazon.com/Better-Off-Flipping-Switch-Technology/dp/0060570040

thanks, nitram, for the recomendation. I just finished it, and it was excellent. Relevant to many aspects of my life (motorfree, subsistence farming, minimal material needs/wants).

I've been reading Walden lately, a bit here and a bit there. More recently got caught up in reading The Human Zoo which is an interesting take on human society that I just can't put down.

I've been reading Walden lately, a bit here and a bit there. More recently got caught up in reading The Human Zoo which is an interesting take on human society that I just can't put down.

Thanks for this one Novakane, I'm about half way done with The Human Zoo, it is deep but great! Haven't been able to put it down! Good times!

-Grant

I recently finished reading This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The more of his work I read the more I like him.

I've just finished Dawdling By The Danube by Edward Enfield and started Freewheeling Through Ireland by the same author. I am really enjoying these books having just got into all things cycling:)

What to Eat (http://www.whattoeatbook.com/) by Marion Nestle.

A fairly radical nutritionist writes about what's available in supermarkets, with much detail about advertising and marketing of food, food safety, fads, economics and politics, etc. This isn't so much a book about selecting a diet as it is about how our food system works in the wealthy nations.

Has anyone read The World Without Us (http://www.worldwithoutus.com/) by Alan Weisman yet? His book Gaviotas (http://www.amazon.com/Gaviotas-Village-Reinvent-Alan-Weisman/dp/1890132284) is definitely on my list of favorites.

Has anyone read The World Without Us (http://www.worldwithoutus.com/) by Alan Weisman yet? His book Gaviotas (http://www.amazon.com/Gaviotas-Village-Reinvent-Alan-Weisman/dp/1890132284) is definitely on my list of favorites.

I'm reading it (http://www.worldwithoutus.com/) right now! So far it's fantastic, and I'll post more when I've finished. He's a great journalist and writer, based on what I've read so far.

Thanks for mentioning Weisman's other book. What else can you tell us about Gaviotas?

New book out by James Howard Kunstler, for those of you who read the Long Emergency... should be a great read. I have it requested at my library.

http://books.google.com/books?id=sLwZGQAACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&sig=iXtOpadnsJWd_kMogs1vlSSDTzA

Just finished reading this one. I've seen some complaints about the book being anti-bike or somesuch. Basically, it's a parable based on Kunstler's assumption that the demise of Western civilization will be a dramatic event that will leave major services (electricity, freeways, government) in total disarray. As a corollary, there are no bicycles left. Everyone travels on foot or horse.

If you can handle that premise, you have something like Jericho the TV series or maybe even the movie The Happening. It's sort of in some ways a cross between a parable and a Western.

I thought it was OK, but miles removed from Kunstler's non-fiction.

Go to www.forestfarm.com and get one of their catalogs of the over 5,000 plants they stock. Much more then just a listing of plants. I leave my copy in the bathroom for reading.

I have a new favorite book. It is "Creating a World Without Poverty", by Mohammed Yunus. Yunus describes his vision of a new kind of capitalism, "social business," working alongside traditional businesses (and the ways he and others have already put social business principles into practice.)

The "social business" model of nonprofit/non-loss business is a model whereby organizations take in enough money to cover operating expenses and are therefore self-perpetuating. One of the difficulties with "charity" organizations is that in hard economic times, the funding from charitable contributions tends to dry up (and this is just when it's needed most). At the same time, Social Businesses do not depend on donations and DO depend financially on the people they exist to serve. Because of their financial dependence on those they serve, these businesses are forced respond to the needs of those they serve; because they do not allow investors to take the profits they earn, these businesses have no incentive to sacrifice their social goals to create profit. A critical feature of "social businesses" is that they sell at least one type of good or service to their clients. In 2006 Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank (a social business he founded) won the Nobel Peace Prize for working to combat poverty in Bangladesh. The Grameen Bank ("grameen" means "village" in Bengali) is one of a number of social businesses that Yunus helped create to combat the extreme poverty in rural Bangladesh - poor people in Bangladeshi villages were given the opportunity to start businesses, mostly serving other nearby poor people, on small loans from the Grameen Bank at very low interest (as opposed to loans by private moneylenders who tended to charge high interest and thereby keep poor women in a state of near-slavery). Since the Grameen Bank opened, there have been a number of other highly successful social businesses that have opened with such social goals as improving nutrition and improving access to electricity in the very poor areas of Bangladesh. While social businesses do not give profits to their investors, they do depend on investors to get started and then seek to quickly earn enough to repay their investors. So by investing in a social business, a person (or grant-making organization) can choose to reinvest in the social goal of the business or to take their funds back. In that sense, the social business has an interest in continuing to respond to the goals its investors have, but it can survive and even expand without funding from anyone except the poor people it serves.

Has anyone read The World Without Us (http://www.worldwithoutus.com/) by Alan Weisman yet? His book Gaviotas (http://www.amazon.com/Gaviotas-Village-Reinvent-Alan-Weisman/dp/1890132284) is definitely on my list of favorites.

On your advice, I picked up copies of both. World without Us was fascinating in spots. Some of the data is fairly well known and it is somewhat depressing...

However, Gaviotas is a blast. I am enthralled by this little community in Colombia. Makes me hope the world will survive a bit longer.

On your advice, I picked up copies of both. World without Us was fascinating in spots. Some of the data is fairly well known and it is somewhat depressing...

However, Gaviotas is a blast. I am enthralled by this little community in Colombia. Makes me hope the world will survive a bit longer.

I was impressed with The World Without Us, although the most depressing parts might have been a little overdone. The main narrative device--imagining what the world would be like if all humans just vanished--was a great framework for discussing the enormous impact we've had on this planet. It changed my thinking about invasive species, as all species are invasive in a real sense. I don't know if there was an answer in the book about humanity's rightful role in the planetary system, but I sense thaat the autors think that it would be a mostly sad thing if our species really did vanish.

I liked it enough that I'm going to look for Gaviotas now.

ZOOM The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future
by Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran

"Oil is the problem. Cars are the solution."

They talk about how oil and cars arose, and how they're going to fall. These guys are very optimistic that we develop clean cars. They have a particular fondness for hydrogen fuel cells, but they think there will be a variety of fuel systems in the cars of the near future. They both write for The Economist, and the book has a lot of the breezy but informative writing you associate with that magazine.

I liked it and it's especially relevant for this crowd.

Winter is past though Keiji Ni****ani's Religion and Nothingness helps recall the calm and quiet of winter.

(I suppose a curse word appears in the author's last name and consequently must be **** edited out so if you're curious it rhymes with spit.)

Mountains Beyond Mountains (http://www.amazon.com/Mountains-Beyond-Healing-World-Farmer/dp/0375506160)
... a book about Dr. Paul Farmer, about a "liberation theology" that says that the poorest people (like many in Haiti) deserve preferential treatment to help them not die so frequently of easily-preventable causes, and about the practice of medicine in third world countries.

Mountains Beyond Mountains (http://www.amazon.com/Mountains-Beyond-Healing-World-Farmer/dp/0375506160)
... a book about Dr. Paul Farmer, about a "liberation theology" that says that the poorest people (like many in Haiti) deserve preferential treatment to help them not die so frequently of easily-preventable causes, and about the practice of medicine in third world countries.

What's a good book about Quakers?

Also, do you know of a Quaker author--Dutch, I believe--who was a ship's captain? He wrote a number of books about travel and history, IIRC. Probably 20 or 30 years ago, but he might still be active.

I got a good one: Five Acres and Independence. Great old book that helped a lot of hippies live as sustainance farmers. It's inspiring.

What's a good book about Quakers?

Also, do you know of a Quaker author--Dutch, I believe--who was a ship's captain? He wrote a number of books about travel and history, IIRC. Probably 20 or 30 years ago, but he might still be active.

http://www.amazon.com/Plain-Living-Quaker-Path-Simplicity/dp/1893732282/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220805403&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Plain-Life-Walking-My-Belief/dp/B00121J232/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220805376&sr=8-1

I've enjoyed those two... But I'm not a Quaker... Yet? :roflmao2:

-Grant

http://www.amazon.com/Plain-Living-Quaker-Path-Simplicity/dp/1893732282/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220805403&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Plain-Life-Walking-My-Belief/dp/B00121J232/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220805376&sr=8-1

I've enjoyed those two... But I'm not a Quaker... Yet? :roflmao2:

-Grant

Thanks, Grant. I'll check them out.

Moby Dick, I mean, you don't get anymore car free than that. Also, the themes of man in nature the hypocritical relationship between "civilized" westerners and "savages" etc... it's all there. Appreciation of nature and the nihilism that seeks to destroy it for personal and commercial gain.

http://bks3.books.google.com/books?id=btgwVOqe4xoC&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&sig=ACfU3U01w4nqK6JT-6vaNTZ5bgT08gFz2w

The European Dream
By Jeremy Rifkin

I just started reading this book, which talks about how the Europeans are building a dream that is quite different from the American Dream. Instead of working for wealth ("living to work") the Europeans seem to appreciate a more balanced view of life ("working to live"). Rifkin builds a compelling story around how the US is deluding itself while burning out...

http://books.google.com/books?id=btgwVOqe4xoC (http://books.google.com/books?id=btgwVOqe4xoC)

What's a good book about Quakers?

Also, do you know of a Quaker author--Dutch, I believe--who was a ship's captain? He wrote a number of books about travel and history, IIRC. Probably 20 or 30 years ago, but he might still be active.

I had never heard of the guy but my girlfriend (who is also Quaker) suggested doing a google search.

Sounds like you had heard about Jan de Hartog:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_de_Hartog

She also suggests a book called "The Quaker Reader (http://www.amazon.com/Quaker-Reader-Jessamyn-West/dp/087574916X)", which is really good (at least the part that I've read of it).

I had never heard of the guy but my girlfriend (who is also Quaker) suggested doing a google search.

Sounds like you had heard about Jan de Hartog:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_de_Hartog

She also suggests a book called "The Quaker Reader (http://www.amazon.com/Quaker-Reader-Jessamyn-West/dp/087574916X)", which is really good (at least the part that I've read of it).

Thank you, cerewa's girlfriend! :)

Yes, Jan de hartog is the writer I was trying to remmber.

I just started reading Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. It's just your run-of-the-mill utopian society novel from the late 19th century. :innocent:

Traffic (http://www.howwedrive.com/) by Tom Vanderbilt.

Now why would a carfree treehugger (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/08/tom-vanderbilt-traffic.php) read a book about roads and driving? For starters, I spend a lot of time on my bike interacting (or trying to interact) with cagers. Alos, I know that sometimes drivers claim they "didn't see the cyclist" until after they hit him/her. Finally, this book has a lot of information on cycling in traffic, and even more about designing road systems that more safely accomodate cyclists and pedestrians.

Traffic is very well researched and well written, and some of the conclusions about human behavior are really beautiful.


http://tomvanderbilt.com/traffic/wp-content/themes/traffic/images/yellow_sign.gif

Re-read Brave New World recently. It is rather eerie how many of the details of that modern society are just slightly exaggerated versions of the present day.

How very true. Another book that comes to mind when thinking about a dystopia is 1984. Orwell was shockingly clairvoyant. Come on the "telescreen" and "big brother is watching you."

I know The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac is not about bicycles, but Japhy Ryder does get around on his. It's mentioned a couple of times throughout the book.

If you're into Kerouac and you've never read it, you should check it out.

Ecotopia


Read it twice, in the early 1980's, as I recall.

I'm reading Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. Not sure how I ever skipped over that one before...

I read that book while on a cross country cycle tour from Los Angeles to Washington DC in 1977, as we were actually riding through that part of Arizona.