Book Review: Living Green, The Missing Manual

Living Green, the Missing Manual by Nancy Conner, pub by O’Reilly, ISBN 0596801726.

This book can be preachy and a bit breathless in some of its content, but it’s really a fascinating and educational read.

Conner works hard to cover a lot of topics and gives you material on everything from the chemicals you may not know about in your home to alternate and renewable energy sources. Along the way she also covers raising a green family (I raised two kids via cloth diapers and was happy to see them covered), building/remodeling, eating green, responsible shopping, and a number of other topics.

A number of topics were thrown out without enough evidence of whether or not there’s really a basis for concern (the impact of volatile organic compounds offgassing from foam in furniture or dryboard markers, for example), but generally Connor does a very nice job of giving you a good background on the topics she’s writing about. There are also a lot of resources referenced in the book so you’re able to go look at more material from one side of the story, at least.

While there’s a chapter dedicated to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” Brown seems to carry that theme through the book. I don’t know if that was intentional or not, but I found it very helpful to consistently find small reminders of those principles in many of the book’s topics. I’m a proponent of reducing the number of things around me and trying to reuse as much as possible – but I’m nowhere near as good at it as I’d like to be.

Overall I enjoyed the book and found it very useful.

Now listening to "Alive" by Off-Kilter