Want green travel that goes beyond LEED-certified chain hotels and flight offsets? Pick up one of the GrassRoutes guides, an urban eco-travel book series put together by Oakland resident Serena Bartlett. These guides reveal the neighborhoody green knowledge that’ll let you get around town like a long-time do-gooder member of the local eco-community.

Here’s the rest of my review.

Want green travel that goes beyond LEED-certified chain hotels and flight offsets? Pick up one of the GrassRoutes guides, an urban eco-travel book series put together by Oakland resident Serena Bartlett. These guides reveal the neighborhoody green knowledge that’ll let you get around town like a long-time do-gooder member of the local eco-community.

Here’s the rest of my review.

Here’s my review of the book.

Feel good about that organic cotton T-shirt you bought? Don’t. Sure, your T-shirt may mean less pesticide pollution, but you’re ignoring all the other horrible ecological impacts of your “quasi-green T-shirt.”

That’s what Daniel Goleman of Emotional Intelligence fame writes. Here’s my review of the book.

An interesting book that profiles many single women and the many different ways they’ve crafted their lives outside the traditional marriage model. The book covers a broad spectrum of women, from women who’ve always been single to divorced women, from women who seem to prefer being single to others who long for a partner.

The one thing I don’t like about this book is the overemphasis on raising children—The author herself is a single woman who chose to adopt a child, and admits that she tended to seek out women who wanted / had children as interviewees. But anyone who misses her single-sentence disclaimer about this fact may be misled into thinking that happy singlehood requires raising a kid (whether your own via blood / adoption or through some other less traditional means like getting heavily involved with relatives’ kids, teaching, etc.)

Still, an interesting and insightful book worth reading :)

A practical, rational, scientific guide—and the best book on sobriety / recovery I’ve read so far. Recovery Options provides a good, level-headed background on all the many options out there, along with solid scientific studies about the efficacy of various programs.

Those who’ve been bothered by AA’s lack of scientific basis (the 12 steps were invented by non-doctors / scientists / experts, and good, science based studies on the effectiveness of AA - esp. as compared to other programs - are sorely lacking) will find this book a breath of fresh air. To be clear, the book isn’t anti AA—It just sedately points out what it’s good at and what it’s not good at, what type of person’s likely to benefit the most from it and what type of person may find it unhelpful or counterproductive, and what’s still unknown about the program’s utility for the general population of alcoholics.

The book can be a bit too drug happy - the author’s the guy who came up with Naltrexone - but otherwise, I learned a lot and was encouraged by the book—

Most helpful to me was the part about how people tend to project how they’re feeling right now into calculating how happy they’ll be doing something in the future—leading to obvious miscalculations. For ex:

“Indeed, one of the hallmarks of depression is that whhen depressed people think about future events, they cannot imagine liking them very much…. because when she imagines the future, she finds it difficult to feel happy today and thus difficult to believe that she will feel happy tomorrow.”

Most remarkable about this book is the fact that it reveals how much the author, despite the title of the book, really got out of AA—how much AA helped her, esp. during her early days of sobriety. In fact, in the conclusion, the author recants a lot of what she says during the book, going on to say AA’s v. useful and that moderate drinking won’t work for most.

Her basic prob with AA seems to be that once she came out of the fog of addiction, she didn’t find that AA solved all her life’s problems - surprise surprise - and thus the book’s about her deciding to diss AA and embrace Deepak Choprah.

Then the rest of the book’s basically empty vague platitudes about fear and love from a woman who really doesn’t seem qualified to be making overarching statements about such broad emotions.

The author does point out some of the limitations of AA that I agree with, particularly AA’s religio-patriarchal bent that sounds a lot like traditional xtian doctrine (i.e. you’re innately sinful and will go to hell unless you follow jesus = you’re innately a drunk and will go crazy or die unless you follow AA’s doctrine and never stop going to meetings). Of course other people’ve already pointed that out, and in fact the most insightful part of this book is the foreword by Charlotte Kasl, who’s written a couple books on this topic.

The book’s a bit too focused on the wonders of AA, and overly pushes AA’s mantras. This means that the book contains some of AA’s religio-puritanical tint - that alcoholics are forever alcoholics and unless they always go to AA meetings will relapse and go to hell (die / go crazy) unless they let go and let god. (I have nothing against AA - think it’s helped a lot of people, and is v. useful for many—just noting that AA isn’t for everyone and it’d be great if this book recognized that too)

Still, The Recovery Book answers a lot of Qs—from physical symptoms to expect to methods of getting back to living a healthy life. Useful book.

Some of my fave passages from this book:

“I can be neither nothing nor everything: I’m just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want.”

“Having seen with what lucidity and logical coherence certain madmen (with method in their madness) justify their crazed ideas to themselves and to others, I have lost for ever any real confidence in the lucidity of my own lucidity.”

“The most painful feelings, the most piercing emotions are also the most absurd ones—the longing for impossible things precisely because they are impossible, the nostalgia for what never was, the desire for what migh have been, one’s bitterness that one is not someone else, or one’s dissatisfaction with the very existence of the world.”

“There is nothing worse than the contrast between the natural splendour of the inner life, with its own Indies and countries still to be explored, and the sordidness, even when it isn’t really sordid, of the everydayness of life. Tedium weighs more heavily when it does not have inertia as an excuse. The tedium of the great and the busy is the worst tedium of all.”