You Are Here

Thomas Kostigen, coauthor of THE GREEN BOOK: THE EVERYDAY GUIDE TO SAVING THE PLANET ONE SIMPLE STEP AT A TIME, endeavors to bring home his point that the little things we do matter to our environment by visiting some of the most affected and endangered places on the planet. Kostigen narrates his own book in an earnest, easy-to-understand voice. Overall, his narration works well for this first-person travel narrative. He occasionally rushes his words, mostly at the beginning of the book. And, like many environmental authors, he offers up an overwhelming series of appalling statistics, which can be difficult for the listener to absorb. But his adventures and metaphors are memorable. F.C. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

July 14, 2008
In a travelogue heavy on statistics but disappointingly pale in atmospherics, Kostigan (The Green Book
) invites readers to accompany him on a trip “into the thick of the most environmentally tenuous places on the planet” to observe the havoc caused by human behavior, from Jerusalem, where acid rain and global warming–induced salt weathering are wearing down the Western Wall, to the sewage-logged Great Lakes. He visits “the future”: the “orgy of color, mayhem, flash modernity, and squalor” of Mumbai; Linfen City, China, “the dirtiest place on Earth”; and the Eastern Garbage Patch, a mid-Pacific “lethal marine habitat” of trash “twice the size of Texas.” Post-trip, Kostigen exclaims, “Now I see people in my actions.... I feel differently about what I do and what it does to the planet.” Unfortunately, his feeble powers of description convey little feeling to the reader (the Amazon jungle is “definitely a bit of Survivor
out here”) and his naïvely optimistic claim that “We have changed the Earth's natural course of development” and “we can just as easily change its course again—for the better” is less than convincing.