Hey everyone! Long time no see! Well I was reminded this morning that it has been almost a month since I last wrote on my blog. School has been keeping me busy, but I'll make it up to you: today I am going to do two blogs on two books: An Inconvenient Truth, and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (Part of the Manifesto Series). Well here we go and I hope you enjoy...An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore.
Characters: Because An Inconvenient Truth is a nonfiction book based off Al Gore's documentary/traveling environmental awareness adventure, their are no main characters.
The Plot: Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is nothing short of a plea to save the environment. Through graphs, polls, interviews and general research, Gore paints a picture of a future in which Earth has been completely depleted and we have let our children down in saving our world. Using his experience as a politician, Gore attempts to convince us that while this problem of global warming may be an inconvenient one, our home is a place worth saving and we cannot allow our children to inherit the problem that we created.
What I liked: I liked that An Inconvenient Truth was an accessible book to the everyday American. Gore created a book that the everyday American could understand and interpret as they wished. The book didn't have a lot of actual words, and the majority of the book was pictures and charts. This makes it easier to read for the everyday individual who doesn't want to read 350 pages of size six font. By making this book accessible, Gore was able to convince a whole new group of people who had potentially never had concerns about the environment, to pick up this book and read about the current state of our world. For me, this struck me as a huge accomplishment. Often times writers create an environmental book that is so complex and unreachable to an everyday person, that it doesn't really get across a point because it is so difficult to understand. The last section of An Inconvenient Truth consisted of information of what we could do as an individual to save the envirnoment which not only gives us something tangible we can latch onto but shows us that it may not be that inconvenient to save the envirnoment anyway. I was surprised by how easy to read the book was for something that was nationally recognized for its impact on the American political system. I would have expected, and I don't think I'm alone in this assumption, that a book that created such a following in the political system would have more to offer than just a few pictures and some graphs. But now I am really getting to what I didn't like so I guess we should just move there.
What I didn't like: This section is where my personal political feelings may come out but I am going to try to be as impartial as possible. First, I don't like that Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize because of his slide show, his documentary and his book. While I understand he brought the energy crisis to the attention of the general public, that's not what the Nobel Peace Prize should be about. The Nobel Peace Prize should show the achievements of a scientist and the groundbreaking work they have conducted, and how their work will change the world. For me, Al Gore just copied and pasted the work of others. That doesn't really apply to the book but it created a negative starting point from which the book jumped off of. Then you get into the actual book. When I was looking up Al Gore just to see what else he had done up until this point, there was an accusation that his data was inaccurate, and that his argument was extremely one-sided. While I cannot attest to the first, I can certainly attest to the second: it was extremely one sided. While that is not exactly a bad thing, it is certainly worth noting. The worst part of this book for me though, is the feeling that his work wasn't good enough. For the praise and recognition he received, it was still a list of statistics with an over the top apocalyptic tone. You can ask my parents...I was pretty pro-environment while I was reading, I think they enjoyed how crazy I sounded with my inability to listen to other scientists they told me about. This just emphasizes how one sided the book is: the apocalyptic tone takes you in and eliminates reason from the argument; I was so overwhelmed by the data and the facts presented that I didn't stop to question and analyze where the data was coming from and what it was saying. The book doesn't look at concepts logically, rather it looks at extreme cases and makes it sound as if the world is about to end any second. And for me, that was something that you cannot do as a writer and Nobel Prize winner. Don't get me wrong, I still think we should protect the environment but the hysteria the book seemed to create seemed vastly out of proportion with the problems. Also, the actual writing in An Inconvenient Truth was very poor. There was a lot of "because" and "so this means" and just general bad grammar. I didn't develop a connection with Al Gore and I felt that the actual content of the book, while being more accessible to some readers, actually turned off others, like myself.
Overall: 4 out of 10. I don't understand why Al Gore is a Nobel Prize winner, and the book left a bad taste in my mouth. I am a big believer that nothing is ever as good or as bad as it may seem at first glance: more often than not it is somewhat in the middle. Gore has no concept of working towards the middle. Its his way or the highway and maybe that's the problem with the current environmental situation. Both groups are so adamant that they cannot change their paths (and that the other side should), that nothing really gets done and we are left with a middle that will never be reached.
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