Books about Mckibben from Amazon.com

Too many people have come to dread the approach of the holidays, a season that should -- and can -- be the most relaxed, intimate, joyful, and spiritual time of the year. In this book, Bill McKibben offers some suggestions on how to rethink Christmastime, so that our current obsession with present-buying becomes less important than the dozens of other possible traditions and celebrations.

Working through their local churches, McKibben and his colleagues found that people were hungry for a more joyful Christmas season. For many, trying to limit the amount of money they spent at Christmas to about a hundred dollars per family, was a real spur to their creativity -- and a real anchor against the relentless onslaught of commercials and catalogs that try to say Christmas is only Christmas if it comes from a store.

McKibben shows how the store-bought Christmas developed and how out of tune it is with our current lives, when we're really eager for family fellowship for community involvement, for contact with the natural world, and also for the blessed silence and peace that the season should offer. McKibben shows us how to return to a simpler and more enjoyable holiday.

Christmas is too wonderful a celebration to give up on, too precious a time simply to repeat the same empty gestures from year to year. This book will serve as a road map to a Christmas far more joyful than the ones you've known in the past..
Price: $7.34 [Notify me when price goes down.]

We have vast oceans of information at our disposal, yet increasingly we seek knowledge with brief glimpses at the Yahoo headlines while juggling other tasks. We are networked as never before, but we tend to communicate even with our most intimate friends and family via instant messaging, email, and fleeting face-to-face moments that are rescheduled a dozen times, then punctuated when they do occur with pings and beeps and more multitasking. Welcome to the land of distraction. Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment. In this new world, something is amiss. And that something is - attention.Journey with Maggie Jackson as she explores the many ways in which we are eroding our capacity for deep, sustained attention - the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. In her sweeping quest to unravel the nature of attention and detail its erosion, she introduces us to scientists, cartographers, marketers, educators, wired teens, virtual lovers from the telegraph age, and roboticists building smart machines to comfort and care for us. She takes us from the nineteenth-century roots of our mobile, virtual multitasking ways into a darkening future of snippets, glimpses, skimming, McThinking, and mistrust. Taking us beyond "Blink and Faster", Jackson makes it clear that if we continue down this road of scattered attention spans and widespread societal ADD, we will be in danger of squandering and devaluing the essence of humanity, and our technological age could ultimately slip into cultural decline.But we are just as capable of igniting a renaissance of attention by strengthening our varied powers of focus and perception, the keys to judgement, memory, morality, and happiness. She describes some of the exciting new scientific research that shows how these skills can be nurtured. "Distraction" is unique in being simultaneously an original expose of the multifaceted nature of attention, an engaging and often surprising portrait of post-modern life, and a compelling roadmap for cultivating sustained focus and nurturing a more enriched and literate society. Pull over, hit the pause button, silence the ringer, and prepare to encounter our land of distraction - this may be your first, and maybe your last, chance to really fathom it..
Price: $14.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]

As America and the world grapple with the consequences of global environmental change, writer and activist Bill McKibben offers this unprecedented, provocative, and timely anthology, gathering the best and most significant American environmental writing from the last two centuries.

Classics of the environmental imagination—the essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—are set against the inspiring story of an emerging activist movement, as revealed by newly uncovered reports of pioneering campaigns for conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches. Here are some of America’s greatest and most impassioned writers, taking a turn toward nature and recognizing the fragility of our situation on earth and the urgency of the search for a sustainable way of life. Thought-provoking essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of “nature” join ecologists’ memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species. The anthology includes a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history, as well as an 80-page color portfolio of illustrations..
Price: $22.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

On the 150th anniversary of its publication, a new edition of the nature classic

First published in 1854, Henry David Thoreau's groundbreaking book has influenced generations of readers and continues to inspire and inform anyone with an open mind and a love of nature. With Bill McKibben providing a newly revised Introduction and helpful annotations that place Thoreau firmly in his role as cultural and spiritual seer, this beautiful edition of Walden for the new millennium is more accessible and relevant than ever.

"[Thoreau] says so many pithy and brilliant things, and offers so many piquant, and, we may add, so many just, comments on society as it is, that this book is well worth the reading, both for its actual contents and its suggestive capacity."
—A. P. Peabody, North American Review, 1854

"[Walden] still seems to me the best youth's companion yet written by an American, for it carries a solemn warning against the loss of one's valuables, it advances a good argument for traveling light and trying new adventures, it rings with the power of powerful adoration, it contains religious feeling without religious images, and it steadfastly refuses to record bad news."
—E. B. White, Yale Review, 1954

"Bill McKibben gives us Thoreau's Walden as the gospel of the present moment." —Robert D. Richardson, Jr., author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind.
Price: $6.07 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Reissued on the tenth anniversary of its publication, this classic work on our environmental crisis features a new introduction by the author, reviewing both the progress and ground lost in the fight to save the earth.

This impassioned plea for radical and life-renewing change is today still considered a groundbreaking work in environmental studies. McKibben's argument that the survival of the globe is dependent on a fundamental, philosophical shift in the way we relate to nature is more relevant than ever. McKibben writes of our earth's environmental cataclysm, addressing such core issues as the greenhouse effect, acid rain, and the depletion of the ozone layer. His new introduction addresses some of the latest environmental issues that have risen during the 1990s. The book also includes an invaluable new appendix of facts and figures that surveys the progress of the environmental movement.

More than simply a handbook for survival or a doomsday catalog of scientific prediction, this classic, soulful lament on Nature is required reading for nature enthusiasts, activists, and concerned citizens alike..
Price: $8.35 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $24.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Using CCD as a metaphor for our own human hive, Schacker asks: Are the bees trying to tell us something? Could this be the warning sign of a much larger crisis looming directly ahead? Might humankind suffer someday from 'Civilization Collapse Disorder'? And how must we change our human hive in order to ensure its survival? Like "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Silent Spring" before it, "A Spring without Bees" is a compelling cautionary tale and a clarion call for action. On the 100th anniversary of the birth of Rachel Carson, the world faces a new environmental disaster, from a chemical similar to DDT.This time the culprit appears to be IMD, or imidacloprid, a relatively new but widely used insecticide in the United States. Many beekeepers and some researchers think IMD is the new prime suspect for the devastating syndrome known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, which has raised the annual die-off rate of honey bees to 30 percent of all the beehives in the United States. They say even trace amounts of IMD make bees lose their desire to feed, which would quickly lead to the collapse of their colony. After several days, there are few or no bees left in the hive. Since honey bees are essential to the production of fruit, nut, and vegetable crops around the world, their demise could spell catastrophe for our food supply and global economy..
Price: $12.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $2.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]