Testament of Youth or The Limits to Growth

Testament of Youth

Author: Vera Brittain

Much of what we know and feel about the First World War we owe to Vera Brittain's elegiac yet unsparing book, which set a standard for memoirists from Martha Gellhorn to Lillian Hellman. Abandoning her studies at Oxford in 1915 to enlist as a nurse in the armed services, Brittain served in London, in Malta, and on the Western Front. By war's end she had lost virtually everyone she loved. Testament of Youth is both a record of what she lived through and an elegy for a vanished generation. Hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as a book that helped "both form and define the mood of its time," it speaks to any generation that has been irrevocably changed by war.

Book about: To the Castle and Back or Of Paradise and Power

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

Author: Donella Meadows

In 1972 four young scientists at MIT wrote The Limits to Growth, which shocked the world and became an international best-seller. Using the World3 computer model, the authors looked toward the future, for the first time showing the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet. Now, armed with 30 additional years of data, these authors sound the alarm on humanity's devastating effects on climate, water quality, fisheries, forests, and other imperiled resources.

Publishers Weekly

Updated for the second time since 1992, this book, by a trio of professors and systems analysts, offers a pessimistic view of the natural resources available for the world's population. Using extensive computer models based on population, food production, pollution and other data, the authors demonstrate why the world is in a potentially dangerous "overshoot" situation. Put simply, overshoot means people have been steadily using up more of the Earth's resources without replenishing its supplies. The consequences, according to the authors, may be catastrophic: "We... believe that if a profound correction is not made soon, a crash of some sort is certain. And it will occur within the lifetimes of many who are alive today." After explaining overshoot, the book discusses population and industrial growth, the limits on available resources, pollution, technology and, importantly, ways to avoid overshoot. The authors do an excellent job of summarizing their extensive research with clear writing and helpful charts illustrating trends in food consumption, population increases, grain production, etc., in a serious tome likely to appeal to environmentalists, government employees and public policy experts. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.