Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Eyes Wide Open: Going Behind the Environmental Headlines by Paul Fleischman

Eyes Wide Open by Paul Fleischman
I think this book would be ok for students who are doing research. I don't think it is something that anyone would want to read all the way through though. This book claims to be a "briefing that will launch you on your own list." of things that you may want to do to save the earth. It's goal is to give students a foundation to base their decisions on. It covers a variety of environmental issues from energy types and peak oil to plastic bags, mass overconsumerism, gmos, pollution and the almighty dollar. Each page has lots of graphics - photos, charts, web links, quotes and drawings. To me, that was a bit overwhelming and distracting. I checked out some of the web links listed, and some of them work, but some do not. My husband and I found the tone of the book to be condescending and patronizing with lines like "Adolescence is dramatic and untidy; so are periods when societies change." I showed the book to several teenagers - my own children and some at the school where I teach, and they liked the look of the book with all the photos and graphics, but thought it looked too boring to read the whole thing. I received this book free to review from Netgalley in the kindle format, but I checked out the book in paper format from the library because the graphics did not work well on the kindle preview copy that I received.

No comments:

Post a Comment