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by Candace McNulty, Contributing Editor
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 by Cody Lundin
Gibbs Smith, Publisher, 2007
450 pp. $19.95
Cody Lundin prowls back and forth on his bare feet in front of us, a two-liter blob of crystal water balanced on his upraised palm. We’re a small group on folding chairs cramped into the mall library branch. Cody’s head brushes the dangling felt bats and ghosts of Halloween, setting them swinging. He seems not to fit so well in civilization as he brandishes this artifact of it: if civilization goes down, he says, this simple thing could save our lives.
The water in Cody’s hand inhabits a naked clear plastic Coke bottle. Lay it down in the sun for several hours; the UV radiation won’t kill all microbes but will whack the sickening guys, E. coli, Salmonella, Cryptosporidium, Giardia, et al. Of course, if your water is turbid with algae or sediment, you’ll need to pour it through coffee filters or a bandanna… And UV wouldn’t have helped in New Orleans, where the floodwater teemed with solvents, pesticides, antifreeze, the urban chem-cocktail. For that, you’d need to make a still.
You know how to make a still, don’t you?
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by Art Merrill
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 Arizona Waterways
A pocket guide to boating and fishing in Arizona
by Mary E. Young.
2007 K&M Press
52 pp, about $6, saddle stitched paperback
Make a where-to-go booklet that actually fits in a vehicle's glovebox. Now, have it show the destination location in a simple illustration, tell the reader how to get there, keep the description short and useful and add a phone number and website address for more info. You've just invented the handiest guide ever on where to launch your boat and wet a line in Arizona.
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by Susan McElheran
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 Under a Green Sky: Global Warming,
The Mass Extinctions of the Past,
and What They Can Tell Us
About Our Future
by Peter D. Ward
2007, Smithsonian Books
242 pp., $26.95, hardbound
Green is my favorite color, so naturally I was drawn to the bottle-green skyscape on this book’s cover. A green sky might be a nice change after eons of cerulean, I thought. Well, I’m here to tell you that Ward is not talking about a lovely lime-green sky. He’s talking about “vomitous” green.
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by Susan McElheran
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 Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
by Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp, and Camille Kingsolver
2007, 370 pages, $26.95, hardcover, HarperCollins Publishers
A recent hint column advised readers to step outside their homes to check the weather so as to know what to wear that day. I howled with laughter to think that anyone needed Heloise to tell them something so obvious. In hindsight, however, I despair that so many Americans are that isolated from their environment.
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by Susan McElheran
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 Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time
Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Penguin Books
2006, 349 pages, $15.00, paperback
Imagine a teenaged Muslim girl bursting into a meeting of 30 men that includes the leader of her remote Pakistani village, an American journalist and the director of an American non-profit. She approaches the latter and demands 20,000 rupees for her tuition to medical school.
This really happened.
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