TV Series: Pillars of the Earth

Can you believe it? They're actually filming the 8 hour series now--and the casting is great (as far as looks go). I pictured Jack different, but the rest of the staff looks like they were bred for the roles. If you haven't been looking forward to 2010, start now. (Official site.)

No Impact Man

My initial reaction to "No Impact Man" was that, far from sounding good, it sounded to me like a horrible insult. My next thought was that writing a book about it was something less than consistent with the aims this author strives for.

Evidently, a reviewer for The New York Times agrees. I found the opening sentence to a review of the book a bit amusing:

There’s a certain problem with branding oneself a radical environmentalist superhero and then letting a real old-fashioned book about the experience roll luxuriously off the presses. I don’t care if the thing is printed in beet juice on paper recycled by indigent Amazonian tribespeople under the glow of beeswax candles!

When you’ve renounced most worldly goods in the name of saving the planet, as Colin Beavan and his family did for most of 2007, it seems a tad contradictory, if not downright hypocritical, to land with a splat two years later in the crowded stacks of Barnes & Noble. Surely there’s a less material way of making an impact...

Published Book Reviews

A review of the book I mentioned a while ago, Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants, has been published in the best quarterly journal out there, The Objective Standard.

You can read a good bit of it for free here. Another review, of Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, can be read at the same site but different location.

Or, you can go to your local Barnes & Noble. Hopefully they are carrying the journal there already. If not, recommend it. And consider yourself cool.