The Good Human » Book Review

Book Giveaway – Urban Farming: Sustainable City Living

david — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:00:17 +0000

It’s another book giveaway here at The Good Human, and this time it’s for a copy of the book Urban Farming: Sustainable City Living in Your Backyard, in Your Community, and in the World. With obesity rates rocketing, concerns about the health implications of a diet composed of drive-through and processed convenience foods rising, and a growing awareness of the benefits of a greener lifestyle, it was perhaps inevitable that the people across the world would be seeking out ways to bring nature back into their lives at home.

This modern-day “back to the land” movement has spawned not a collection of hippy survivalists but rather evolved to inspire a nation of urban gardens, backyard chickens, found materials projects and recycled chic. The allure of combining city life and natural beauty has encouraged people from all walks of life to try their hand at some form of urban farming.

Brought to you by the editors of Urban Farm magazine, Urban Farming: Sustainable City Living in Your Backyard, in Your Community, and in the World is packed with easy-to-understand facts, illustrations, and step-by-step information. Not only does Urban Farming walk its readers through practical how to’s; it provides the background and context to understand how small changes in their lives yield benefits in their home, their community, and society as a whole. Is urban gardening something you are interested in? You should definitely enter to win a copy of this book! Here are the rules…

- The giveaway starts now and will be open until Friday, July 29, 2011 at 7am MST. No entries will be accepted after that.
- To enter, please leave a comment (with a valid email address, so I can contact you) here on this post with the following info:

The urban area you live in
What you would attempt to grow and why
Where you would attempt to grow it. This could be on the balcony, the backyard, the front steps, etc.

- Emailed entries will not be counted — entry by comment on this post only.
- Only one entry per person. Period. Please don”™t try to use different email addresses, etc, as the IP numbers will be checked.
- Entries must be from residents from the U.S., and book will be shipped via Media Mail
- One winner will be chosen at random from all eligible entries received and notified via email after the giveaway ends

Simple, right? And if you don’t think that gardening in an urban setting is possible, check with my friend Mike over at Urban Organic Gardener. He has been growing his own organic food for years, first on a fire escape in Brooklyn and now on a balcony in Los Angeles. He would be the first one to tell you that urban gardening works, so if this is something you are interested in trying to do, enter to win the book or pick up a copy for yourself.

Good luck!

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Giveaway: Four Copies Of ‘The Healthy Home’

david — Tue, 24 May 2011 13:00:26 +0000

It’s time for another giveaway here on The Good Human! This time I am giving away 4 copies of the book The Healthy Home: Simple Truths to Protect Your Family from Hidden Household Dangers by Dr. Myron Wentz and Dave Wentz, which I just recently finished reading myself. Full of great information and advice about the toxins we could be poisoning ourselves with inside (and outside) of our homes and what to do to clean them up. The authors walk the reader through a typical house, pointing out the dangers that may be hidden from view but can be serious health issues. While a lot of the information is probably well-known by long-time readers of this site, I learned quite a few tips that I can implement in my home right away. Here’s a snippet from the book:

Have you ever considered:

- Chemicals added to fabrics to enhance durability and stain and wrinkle resistance have been linked to both reproductive and developmental toxicity, as well as cancers of the liver and bladder. But organic cotton contains none of these.

- Aluminum can induce oxidative damage, which has been linked to Parkinson’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)””yet a typical dose of your regular antacids can contain as much as 400 mg of aluminum. A little soda water anyone?

- Your cooking pans coated with non-stick Teflon can release six toxic gases when heated up to 680Â°F on a regular electric stove, including two carcinogens, two global pollutants, and a chemical known to be lethal to humans. Maybe the extra scrubbing of a regular pan is worth it.

- The air in your home is constantly filled with toxins from the paint on your walls, the glue that holds down your carpet, and the fire-retardant chemicals coating your comfy mattress. You can learn how to minimize your exposure.

With the help of The Healthy Home, you’ll learn about the dangerous substances you may be exposed to on a daily basis, and the simple but effective changes you can start making today that will help you and your family reduce your toxic burden.

While I did enjoy the book, my only issue with it came from some rather silly scare tactics about CFL light bulbs. Sure, there is mercury in them; we all know that by now. But the truth is that compact fluorescent light bulbs use up to 75% less energy and last up to 10 times longer than incandescents, and if every home in America replaced just one incandescent bulb with a single CFL, in one year it would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes. The Environmental Health Watch says that “the overall mercury exposure from coal-fired power plants is very substantially reduced by use of CFLs” so I am not as much concerned with breaking a bulb in my home as much as I am about reducing the demand for more coal-fired power plants required when people don’t reduce their energy dependence at home. For more information on CFLs and any potential hazards, check out my posts Are CFL light bulbs dangerous? and who is behind the fear mongering over CFL bulbs.

Overall, I do recommend you check out this book if you are concerned about the potential toxins surrounding you and your family. It offers solid advice, tips, and alternatives to help you clean up your environment at home. The authors are also donating all proceeds from the book to The Children’s Hunger Fund, so if you don’t win a copy here you can know that your purchase of the book goes towards that cause. Now, how can you win a copy? It’s quite simple, really. Follow the below rules to enter:

- The giveaway starts now and will be open until Thursday morning, May 26th, 2011 at 7am MST.
- To enter, please leave a comment (with a valid email address, so I can contact you) here on this post as to why you would like to win a copy of the book. Emailed entries will not be counted, entry by comment only.
- Only one entry per person. Period. Please don”™t try to use different email addresses, etc, as the IP numbers will be checked.
- Entries must be from residents from the U.S.
- Four winners will be chosen at random from all eligible entries received and notified via email.

Good luck everyone!

Books were provided by Larsen Global.

Review: Slow Is Beautiful By Cecile Andrews

david — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 14:30:57 +0000

I always have about 4 or 5 books going at the same time at my house, and one of them right now is the book “Slow is Beautiful – New Visions of Community, Leisure and Joie De Vivre” by Cecile Andrews and I recommend it to anyone who thinks that the high-paced, fast-moving community of today is only going to end in one giant burnout. Although I definitely do need to slow down a little more often, it is something I am working on and trying to be more aware of in my life, and reading books such as this one help me to remember what else I am supposed to be doing other than staring at the computer screen all day.

The slow movement is not so much a “slow down when driving” thing as a “slow down when going through life” thing. Cecile Andrews talks about an experience with an SUV driver screaming and throwing raisins at someone because the person was taking too much time to park their car when she realized that our community has turned on itself all in the name of speed, money, status and greed. I tend to agree. The haves are having more and more while the have nots are losing even more ground. People are buying McMansions so their neighbors and families will think that they are rich, corporations are giving multi-million dollar bonuses to executives who fail while cutting bonuses and health care for their employees who do the actual work. Instead of helping each other out, it seems that a lot of people are only out for themselves while ignorantly speeding along towards their own demise. Not stopping to play with their kids, take a look at nature, enjoy a sunset…just gotta keep buying, consuming, earning, stealing, DOING. As long as they are busy, it is harder to see just how unhappy they really are with their choices in life.

As I work towards leading a simpler life one day, reading these books are important because I think they keep me grounded and keep me from falling into the trap of buy, consume, spend, buy, consume, spend. Living here in L.A. right now it is very easy to see what every one else has and find yourself unconsciously longing for it as well.

Although I try to get “one-time read” books from the library, this is one that I knew I wanted to own and check back in with from time to time. If you are a book shopper, you can get it anywhere, including at Amazon, where The Good Human gets a few cents if you buy it through this link:

Slow is Beautiful: New Visions of Community, Leisure and Joie de Vivre

Sales of items on Amazon helps keep things running around here, so thanks in advance if you buy a book through a link you find on the site. If you are finding yourself falling into the trap of consumerism and a ridiculously high-speed lifestyle that you didn’t mean to sign up for, I really recommend you check out this book.

Book Review: Twelve By Twelve by William Powers

david — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:30:34 +0000

If how many dog-eared pages a book has after you have finished it is any indication of how good it is, Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream is amazing. I have never (and I do mean never) folded down that many corners of pages I wanted to revisit later in a single book. And in all honesty, I don’t even want to really say too much about the book because I believe you have to experience it for yourself – I don’t want to inject my interpretation of it too much and possibly spoil it for you. When I started the book, I expected nothing more than a story about a guy who lives in a 12×12 off grid cabin, which is a story I have read 100 times. But this book is not that, not at all – it is so much more and so very different than what I was expecting. It’s about growth, indecision, struggle, and joy while being full of honesty and authenticity. It is, hands down, the best non-fiction book I have read this year, without a doubt. Basically, the book is about the author going to stay in an off grid cabin on 30 acres in NC which is owned by a physician who willingly lowered her salary to $11,000 – so she wouldn’t have to pay income tax and thus not fund any wars. The author, who has been a busy international activist for many years, is struggling with being a “man without a country” (I feel like this quite often) and finds the time in this cabin to evaluate his life, his lifestyle, his needs and his wants – oftentimes without expected results.

This book is so much bigger than I expected it to be, and again without giving away too much, I wanted to share a few short pieces from some of my dog-eared pages…

Solitude’s richest gift is allowing one’s own thoughts to flow, and not through mental aqueducts built by others.

Today it’s not the British Empire colonizing us, but a pervasive corporate globalism.

Walking the aisles of the organic Adams Market, I looked around and saw what I might become: a holier-than-thou progressive, carving an identity niche out of being so darn responsible.

I have helped create rainforest-protecting municipal reserves, indigenous areas, and community forests that have successfully resisted logging, mining, and industrial farming. But these efforts have been trounced by the global trend. Have I been merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

When I fly over the rainforest into these places, I feel the irony. Planes spew dangerous global warming gasses into the stratosphere that hasten the desertification that fuels rainforest decline.

Ironically, the more I treated my life energy as sacred and lived frugally, the more I was able to indulge myself; I could gush generously where it counted.

I could go on and on with more of my favorite passages, but you really need to read the entire book for yourself. I cannot recommend this book enough; books don’t usually affect me this much, and this one has definitely changed my viewpoint on, and my perception of, life. I plan on rereading it many times over, and will continue to fold down pages and highlight important passages for a long time to come. Thank you, Mr. Powers.

If you are looking for a book to inspire you and change you, then borrow, beg for, or buy this book – you won’t be sorry.