Places: Habitats of a Human Lifetime - Softcover

Shabecoff, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0615686184 ISBN 13: 9780615686189

Publisher: PLACES, 2012

Synopsis

This is a memoir, but its principal subject is not my life. It is instead a memoir about places-places where I lived, or worked or visited, some just briefly. It is written with the hindsight of all I have learned about the environment, a field I have followed closely for nearly half a century in the latter part of a long career as a reporter, publisher and author. This is not a travel book. It is a book about how a life is affected by the places we in inhabit and how we, in turn, affect those places. It describes the places in which I have lived-the Bronx, Manhattan, Westchester County, Washington, D.C., the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts, a small village and small city in Germany, Tokyo-and some of the places I have visited for work or pleasure-the Catskill mountains, the American West, Vietnam, Bali, East Africa, France and England. It describes those places as natural and social ecologies. And finally, the book is about the harm we humans are wreaking on the places we inhabit, including the planet which is our only home.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Shabecoff was the chief environmental correspondent for the "New York Times" for fourteen of the thirty-two years he worked there as a reporter. After leaving the "Times", he founded and published Greenwire, an online daily digest of environmental news. He has appeared on Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Washington Week in Review, CNN News, C-Span, National Public Radio, and the BBC. For his environmental writing, Shabecoff was selected as one of the Global 500 by the United Nations Environment Programme. He received the James Madison Award from the American Library Association for leadership in expanding the public's right to know. His previous books include "A Fierce Green Fire: A History of the American Environmental Movement."

From Kirkus Reviews

Environmental writer Shabecoff’s memoir is informed by his passionate, decades-old interest in the natural (and sometimes urban) environment—what it means to us and how humans have worked assiduously to destroy it. Each essay describes and comments upon one of the many places where Shabecoff has resided or at least visited in along career as a writer for the New York Times. Now nearing 80, he finds it’s time to look back, sometimes fondly, sometimes angrily. Shabecoff is neither a fanatic nor a purist: “I like my wilderness not too wild,” and “I believe in the sanctity of life, but I make exceptions for biting insects.There’s no love lost between him and conservative administrations whose goal was to privatize everything and give powerful industries free rein. In fact, Shabecoff—who’s rubbed elbows with numerous movers and shakers over the years—never pulls his punches, calling out those he sees on the side of the angels and those not. As expected from a man who’s dealt with words his whole adult life, the writing is consistently graceful, with rarely a false step. “The Last Place,” for instance, begins on an elegiac note related to mortality, then slowly builds into as bracing a jeremiad against greed and stupidity as readers are likely to find anywhere. A must-read for anyone interested in the environment—shouldn’t that mean everyone?

About this edition

• Publisher: PLACES
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0615686184
• ISBN 13: 9780615686189
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 282