Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7856 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-26
• Released on: 2006-05-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 328 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The much-discussed and highly regarded 2006 book and film by Gore arrives on audio two years later. While the material and central focus on global warming is clearly the most important aspect of the book, Beau Bridges is the only truly captivating reader here. Cynthia Nixon and Blair Underwood tend to drone on in monotone voices that take some of the impact out of Gore's findings. Bridges, however, reads with a stern and commanding tone that grips readers from the very start, never failing to relate the information with sheer honesty and true grit. As a whole, the audio is still as important and poignant as the original, and though certain aspects have been left out, the listener is still met with the same urgency to act. A Rodale paperback.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Blair Underwood is an author and award-winning actor, director, and producer. He lives in Los Angeles, California. Visit his website at www.BlairUnderwood.com

From AudioFile
In this succinct abridgment of Gore's treatise on global warming, we learn what greenhouse gasses are, how long scientists have been measuring them, what they do, and what we can do to reduce them. The U.S. government has not pushed reforms for reasons of politics and convenience, but Gore maintains that individuals can help by buying energy-saving light bulbs and hybrid vehicles and supporting wind power. Beau Bridges reads the autobiographical parts well, particularly the sensitive section on Gore's sister Nancy's death from lung cancer. But one is aware that Bridges's voice is not the former Vice President's. Nixon and Underwood (familiar TV actors) do a good sell job with the remaining sections. All of this is well organized and certainly worth heeding. J.B.G. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Pay attention to who attacks this book
If you read the customer reviews of this book closely, you'll notice two things:

1. The majority of the one and two star reviews are written by people who apparently haven't read the book or seen the movie and are just using this space to promote their own, or somebody else's, book.

2. These same people, many of whom describe An Inconvenient Truth as "political propaganda," are also overwhelmingly promoting a right wing political agenda that has NOTHING to do with mainsteam science.

As both the book and the movie point out in careful detail, over 900 peer-reviewed, independent, international scientific studies have all reached the same conclusion: Global warming is real, it is being exacerbated by the burning of fossil fuels, and it constitutes a clear and present danger to human health and safety and the global economy.

It's time for America to stop shirking its responsibility as the dominant superpower in the face of a global climate crisis. We need more leaders like the former vice president with the guts to challenge American business and technology to come up with job-creating innovations that will help reduce CO2 emissions so our children can inherit a planet that is as habitable as the one we were born to.

Let's show the world America hasn't lost its can-do spirit!

Best Climate Change Starter Book Yet
I am a layman who loves to read books about science. To me politics has no business mucking around in science. I simply want to know what research is being done in a field, and what the general scientific consensus is about a given topic.

Al Gore's book is an excellent starting point for those who want to learn some of the basics of global warming, but are reluctant to leap into a more academic book on the subject. Although I have read several books on this topic I was interested to see what Al Gore had to say about it. When I got my copy my first reaction was "Oh no, this is just a simple minded picture book." I was mistaken. Pictures are worth a thousand words. We are presented with photos of glaciers taken now, and in the past. The change is startling. Or the satellite photos of Lake Chad, which used to be the size of Lake Erie, but has almost totally dried up in just 40 years.. He tells us about those cute penguins we saw in the movie "March of the Penguins": 70% of them are now gone. They can't find enough hard ice to raise their offspring. The statistics he presents in many graphs are quite frightening. Sample: in the 1950s there were about 10 floods in the U.S.; In the 1990s there were close to 200.

Some readers who want to learn about global warming, but who are not fans of Mr. Gore might tire of the several biographical segments added to the book. Whatever your feelings are about him, you have to admire the amount of traveling he did to seek out answers. He's gone through all the continents - traveled up the Amazon, been to both Antarctica and the North Pole (both on top of it, and under it in a submarine).

Mind you, this book will not take you a long distance into the topic. It is an introduction, and if the material presented intrigues you, then you should take the next step and read some more books on the subject such as:

The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart (a history of global warming research)
Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert (easy reading)
Red Sky At Morning by James Speth (how do we address the problem)
Is The Temperature Rising, by George Philander (a little more technical)
The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery (easy reading)
Climate Change by William Burroughs (quite technical)
The Ice Chronicles by Paul Mayewski (about the ice cores that tell us about past climate)
High Tide by Mark Lynas (how global warming is already affecting people)
The Long Summer by Brian Fagan (climate change through the history of civilization)
Atmosphere, Climate and Change by Thomas Graedel (somewhat technical but accessible)

The Factual Evidence is Devastating
OK, I'm a lifelong Republican. And for the longest time I resisted the 'global warming' stuff as "hogwash" as Rush says. But for the first time, the actual facts in this book changed my mind. I'm somewhat embarrassed by the overwhelming evidence submitted by Gore, but hey, when you're right, you're right. Congratulations, you've got to hand it to someone who sticks with an issue until the truth comes out.