THE WORLD WITHOUT US

WELL, THIS WAS A LOVELY READ!

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman is copyrighted 2007, and was published by Thomas Dunne Books, which is an imprint of St. Martin's Press, if you can believe that.

WHAT CAN I SAY? WHERE DO I START?

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON THIS FEEL-GOOD MUST-READ:

>> The guy starts right out talking about US. "After we're gone," the author muses on page 16, "nature's revenge for our smug, mechanized superiority arrives waterborne." He goes on to paint an intoxicating word-picture of the rain seeping into every nook and cranny of human accomplishment, eating pits into the metal, wearing away the mortar, rotting away the boards. Before you know it, every trace is gone. SWOON!

>> He goes ON AND ON about what would happen if every human UPPED AND VANISHED. He didn't say HOW. He mentioned the Rapture as a possibility -- you know, the one where everyone flies up to that Christian Heaven of theirs and leaves their clothes and shoes behind -- but he didn't even THINK of the Fish Revolution wherein everyone walks into the sea and swims away to dwell in wonder and glory forever with Dagon.

>> He also goes into how much human effort goes DAILY into keeping the water out of their high-and-dry world. The illustration above is some artist's happy impression of the results on the day New York City finally FAILS in its efforts to keep 13 million gallons of eager water from flooding the subways.

>> He gives more than a few examples of why the flood CAN'T HAPPEN TOO SOON. Check out the chapter on plastics, for instance. And the one on radioactive waste. Gee, when I was a bipedal college student a guest professor said to a whole classful of kids like me, with his head held high, that nuclear energy is, and I quote, "ABSOLUTELY CLEAN." Garsh, you mean he lied?

>> He also gives us a picture of what DRY LAND will be like when the featherless bipeds are extinct. "The wrecking crews weren't just trees...but also flowers. Tiny seeds of wild Cyprus cyclamen had wedged into cracks, germinated, and heaved aside entire slabs of cement." SWOON!

Well, if I tell you too much, it'll ruin the whole book for you. My advice is this: DROP EVERYTHING AND READ IT.

>> Oh, just ONE MORE, from page 267: "Barely one square mile, Johnson Atoll is a marine Chernobyl and Rocky Mountain Arsenal rolled into one -- and like the latter its latest incarnation is as a U.S. National Wildlife Refuge. Divers there report seeing Angelfish with herringbone chevrons on one side and something resembling a cubist nightmare on the other." AND YET WE SURVIVE.

I LOVE THIS BOOK!