Eating Animals

Author: Jonathan Safran Foer 
Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood-facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf-his casual questioning took on an urgency His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits-from folklore to pop culture to family traditions and national myth-and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting. Marked by Foer's profound moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the vibrant style and creativity that made his previous books, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, widely loved, Eating Animals is a celebration and a reckoning, a story about the stories we've told-and the stories we now need to tell. 

Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness

Author: Tracy Kidder
Strength in What Remains is an unlikely story about an unreasonable man. Deo was a young medical student who fled the genocidal civil war in Burundi in 1994 for the uncertainty of New York City. Against absurd odds--he arrived with little money and less English and slept in Central Park while delivering groceries for starvation wages--his own ambition and a few kind New Yorkers led him to Columbia University and, beyond that, to medical school and American citizenship. That his rise followed a familiar immigrant's path to success doesn't make it any less remarkable, but what gives Deo's story its particular power is that becoming an American citizen did not erase his connection to Burundi, in either his memory or his dreams for the future. Writing with the same modest but dogged empathy that made his recent Mountains Beyond Mountains (about Deo's colleague and mentor, Dr. Paul Farmer) a modern classic, Tracy Kidder follows Deo back to Burundi, where he recalls the horrors of his narrow escape from the war and begins to build a medical clinic where none had been before. Deo's terrible journey makes his story a hard one to tell; his tirelessly hopeful but clear-eyed efforts make it a gripping and inspiring one to read

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope

Author: William Kamkwamba

William Kamkwamba was born in Malawi, a land withered by drought and hunger, a place where hope and opportunity were hard to find. But William had read about windmills and dreamed of building one that would bring his family electricity and running water, luxuries that only two percent of Malawians could afford. He used scrap metal, tractor parts, and bicycle halves to forge a crude machine that eventually powered four lights, complete with homemade switches and a circuit breaker made from nails and wire. A second windmill turned a water pump that could battle the drought and famine looming with every season.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind will inspire anyone who doubts the power of one individual's ability to change his community and better the lives of those on an entire continent.

Wisdom Song: The Life of Baba Amte

Author: Neesha Mirchandani

To the dalai lama, he is an extraordinary person, and to Gandhi, he was the abhay sadhak. He, however, describes himself as “just the mad son of a mad mother”. He is a nonagenarian living legend, a dreamer and an achiever — Baba Amte.

Rediscovering the life of a legendary maverick is “a dangerous thing”, says Neesha Mirchandani. She has exploited all possible sources — existing biographies, reports, documentaries, audio interviews, articles and so on — to make this biography a collective memory of those who have known Baba over the years.

Baba Amte, a lawyer-turned-healer, nursed people with leprosy at a time when it was incurable. “We see beauty,” said Baba, “in the ruins of the Ajanta and Ellora caves. Then why can’t we see the beauty in the ruins of man?... I started my leprosy work to find answers to these questions.”

In 1949, Baba launched Maharogi Sewa Samiti at Warora in Maharashtra and subsequently took a medical training at the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine so that he could treat people with leprosy. Upon his return to Warora he successfully treated almost 4,000 patients. In 1951, Maharogi Sewa Samiti was granted fifty acres of land, three kilometres from Warora.

Baba set up the samiti’s first commune there and named it Anandwan. He went there with his wife, two sons, one cow, a dog and Rs 14. He turned that stretch of rocky, barren land into a thriving settlement. Some criticized Baba for making ‘the poor disabled’ leprosy patients toil for the commune, but according to him this made them self-reliant and proud of their own strengths. In 1967, Baba moved to Somnath and within a decade, six communes were set up there. He started Lok Biradari Prakalp at Hemalkasa in 1973 to reach out to the Madia Gond tribals.

In the wake of Operation Blue Star, Baba embarked on two national integration campaigns — Bharat Jodo — in 1985 and 1987 to kindle the spirit of communal harmony.

During his controversial vigil by the Narmada river (1990-2000), Baba, coping with a crippling spinal degenerative disease, stayed at Nijbal to show his solidarity with the Narmada Bachao Andolan activists and for state-sponsored environmental plunder. This move came in for severe criticism, and finally Baba decided to return home. He tried to arrange for a peace trip to Pakistan in 2000, but in vain.

Mirchandani has skillfully mingled facts and fiction while portraying Baba and his authority in a gripping narrative. Her approach is simple, but she knows well how to retell a story. Thus, she goes beyond the role of a researcher.

Baba Amte made a simple discovery — “Your work is your life made visible”. His sermon can still inspire many in this country and usher in a sea change.

Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity

Author: Dr James Hansen

An urgent and provocative call to action from the world’s leading climate scientist—speaking out here for the first time with the full story of what we need to know about humanity’s last chance to get off the path to a catastrophic global meltdown, and why we don’t know the half of it. In Storms of My Grandchildren, Dr. James Hansen—the nation’s leading scientist on climate issues—speaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: The planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return. Although the threat of human-caused climate change is now widely recognized, politicians have failed to connect policy with the science, responding instead with ineffectual remedies dictated by special interests. Hansen shows why President Obama’s solution, cap-and-trade, which Al Gore has signed on to, won’t work; why we must phase out all coal, and why 350 ppm of carbon dioxide is a goal we must achieve if our children and grandchildren are to avoid global meltdown and the storms of the book’s title. This urgent manifesto bucks conventional wisdom (including the Kyoto Protocol) and is sure to stir controversy, but Hansen—whose climate predictions have come to pass again and again, beginning in the 1980s when he first warned Congress about global warming—is the single most credible voice on the subject worldwide. Hansen paints a devastating but all-too-realistic picture of what will happen in the near future, mere years and decades from now, if we follow the course we’re on. But he is also an optimist, showing that there is still time to do what we need to save the planet. Urgent, strong action is needed, and this book, released to coincide with the Copenhagen Conference in December 2009, will be key in setting the agenda going forward to create a groundswell, a tipping point, to save humanity—and our grandchildren—from a dire fate more imminent than we had supposed.