Disappearance is what these three things in the title have in common. The books below challenge their extinction.


Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America
by Stephen Trimble
University of California
978-0-520-25111-3

When Earl Holding bought the bankrupt Snowbasin ski area in Ogden, Colorado, in 1984, he was already the owner of Sun Valley in Utah, not to mention Sinclair Oil. Yes, he had the top of the mountain, so to speak, but not the bottom. That belonged to the National Forest—in other words, to you and me. In 1996, still without the additional land, Snowbasin was named a venue for the 2002 Winter Olympics, and the pressure came to a head. Earl Holding wanted all the land, a complete whole to shape and build on and call his own. Don’t we all. As Trimble writes, “On some levels, I am Earl—we are all Earl.”

Writer, photographer, and naturalist Trimble begins his story about 30 miles outside of Laramie, Wyoming, and ends up right at the dinner table of everyone who has ever wanted to put up a fence. “How do we live ethically on land as it shifts underneath us with changing values, exploding growth, and money and politics wielding brute force?” writes Trimble. “I’m looking for answers.”


Greasy Rider: Two Dudes, One Fry-oil-powered Car, and a Cross-country Search for a Greener Future
by Greg Melville
Algonquin Books
978-1-56512-595-7

In the breezy style indicating a membership in the Men’s Journal club (also required are a wife in charge and a rather substandard knowledge of how things really work), Greg Melville sets off from Vermont to Berkeley in a 1980s Mercedes wagon, converted to run on restaurant grease. A few miles out of town, “wingman” Iggy suggests a bet, that Melville can’t “extract a lesson” in sustainability from every day they’re on the road. Melville eventually agrees, although he’d rather that Iggy just die. As a seasoned travel writer, Melville knows that tragic death beats “lessons” every time.

Motoring backwards in the path of H. Nelson Jackson, the first guy to drive coast to coast (1903), Melville and Iggy get to the brightly lit bottom of Al Gore’s personal energy consumption and suggest possible answers to questions like:

Is God angry that men have so messed up the environment?
How will the revolution be won?
Dude, would you really want to live there?

Brady Bunch allusions, waitresses, road rage, and sucking grease out of the bottom of dumpsters are just some of the joys found in this travelogue—the “lessons” are conveniently printed in a different font. Above all, this book is a tribute to American driving spirit: Gas or Grease, We Will Always Find a Way to Hit the Highway.


One Thousand Languages: Living, Endangered, and Lost
Edited by Peter K. Austin
University of California
978-0-520-25560-9

While the two books featured above could be printed in any medium without disrupting the message, this one needs heavy paper, lots of color, and sturdy boards. Open it up and it smells like wall-to-wall ink. After all, this is a book about language.

Divided into sections like “World Languages” (considerably spoken beyond its point of origin), then regionally, then by absence, One Thousand Languages is illustrated with the written shapes of the letters, the landscapes that produced the sounds, and the people who speak them. Each represented language also includes an article about origins and present usage. Kituba, for example, spoken by 4.3 million, began as a contact language among Africans of different tribes living along the Congo River when Portuguese traders arrived. As many of these same Central Africans were taken away to the Americas as slaves, the language survives abroad in Brazilian, Jamaican, and Cuban religious rituals; it’s a source of for Gullah, a language spoken in South Carolina and Georgia; and it became the Palenquero creole in Colombia.

Peter K. Austin has published eleven books on the lesser-spoken and endangered languages. In an article in the Guardian, Austin lists his top ten from the more than 3,000 disappearing tongues. “My selection is a personal one that tries to take into account four factors: (1) geographical coverage—if possible I wanted at least one language from each continent; (2) scientific interest—I wanted to include languages that linguists find interesting and important, because of their structural or historical significance; (3) cultural interest—if possible some information about interesting cultural and political aspects of endangered languages should be included; and (4) social impact—I wanted to include one or more situations showing why languages are endangered, as well as highlighting some of the ways communities are responding to the threat they currently face.”

This book is very warmly recommended for school libraries.