New York Times: “Getting a Grip” and “Diet for a Small Planet” are must-reads for the next president
admin June 2nd, 2008
In this new piece from the New York Times‘ Sunday Book Review, Frances’s first book Diet for a Small Planet, and her latest, Getting a Grip, have been recommended (by Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, no less) as must-reads for the next US president.
Writing about Diet (as well as of Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America, Pollan writes: “In Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappé shone a light on the wastefulness and environmental costs of meat-eating, predicting that humanity’s growing appetite for meat would lead to hunger for the world’s poor. Together these two visionary writers — who fell out of favor during the cheap-food and cheap-energy years that began in the ’80s and are just now coming to a calamitous close — still have much to say about the way out of our current predicament.”
About Getting a Grip, Kingsolver writes: “Forget the personality claptrap: our next president will need to know how to restructure the carbon-based economy, pronto. I assume all the candidates have read An Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore, so they understand that anything they promise will have to be delivered without cheap fossil fuels. For further reading, Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy and Frances Moore Lappé’s Getting a Grip offer new definitions of progress and economy with an eye toward the human aptitudes for resourcefulness and community.”
