Reading Corner - Dreaming Green Book Review

"Going Green" is one of the latest trends. These days nobody wants to get caught carrying a plastic bag or throwing a water bottle in the trash. However, for some people, "going green" is much more than a fad- it's a lifestyle. Dreaming Green was coauthored by husband and wife duo, Paul Gleicher (LEED accredited architect and founder and president of the prestigious Gleicher Design Group) and Lisa Sharkey (senior vice president and director of creative development at HarperCollins), who committed to living green before renovating their Upper West Side Manhattan brownstone. For the Sharkey-Gleicher family, which also includes the couple's three young children, this meant that practically everything in their home would be "sustainable or recycled, super-energy efficient, and chemical free."

Dreaming-green, unlike other "coffee table" design books, Dreaming Green isn't only about beautiful photographs and design plans. For each of the seventeen eco-friendly homes featured in this book, there are up to five pages of detailed explanation about what types of materials went into transforming that home and how they were obtained, as well insight into the design process. Dreaming Green features a variety of homes from an "eco-farmhouse" in upstate New York to an "eco-manor" in Atlanta, Georgia.

For those who are considering making environmentally conscious changes in their own homes, there are over ten pages of resources in the back of the book, providing readers with access to many of the materials utilized in the featured homes. The "Resources" section includes everything from eco-friendly paints to kitchen cabinetry to flooring to geothermal heating, and much more. This section alone makes Dreaming Green an invaluable resource for people who are seriously planning to renovate their own homes.

Gleicher, Paul, and Lisa Sharkey. Dreaming Green. 1st ed. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2008.

Caitlin Costello is a copywriter for Yodle Local, a business directory and online advertising company. Find more going green tips and info at http://local.yodle.com/articles

Zubi Diamond Introduces the Kingmakers to the Conspirators

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I am still waiting for our economy to recover and am wondering if present stimulus package and other recovery efforts are really going to work. And I begin to wonder if recovery is possible if our leaders don't really understand what caused our economy to crash in the first place.

Then I come across some information online about a new book by Zubi Diamond entitled "Wizards of Wall Street & Washington Lap dogs; The Scam That Elected Barak Obama." Diamond writes that President Obama is not aware that the crash was caused by financial advisors who have close access to the White House.

As I read a few more pages I learn that the author believes a group of highly-placed and influential hedge-fund conspirators convinced the SEC to eliminate safeguards that were in place since 1938 to prevent the stock market from crashing. One the SEC safeguards were gone, the conspirators engineered the near-collapse of our economic system. Diamond identifies George Soros as the mastermind of this effort.

This excerpt from the book is a good summary of what Diamond things of short-sellers: "Hedge Fund short sellers do not want price appreciation or increase in value, they only want and have an expectation of a future price decline and decrease in value leading to the destruction of the companies. Hedge Fund short sellers are not investors; they are masquerading as investors, they are the proverbial wolves in sheep's clothing; they are the financial market looters, selling what they never owned and stealing what they never owned, because that is what short selling allows them to do."

The author says our congressional committees and representative leaders have surrendered the responsibility to write policy and regulate banks and the stock market to hedge-fund short-sellers whose greed for power and money led them to subvert capitalism and our free economy.

Before recovery really is possible, says the author, the administration and congress must reinstate the uptick rule, circuit breakers and the trading curb, remove mark-to-market accounting and replace it with cost accounting, dismantle and quit trading all ETFs, regulate hedge funds in the same manner as mutual funds and pension funds, and regulate speculation on crude oil futures.

After reading the first chapter I was thinking that this is just another conspiracy theory book and was about to lay it down. But after reading the next three chapters I came to realize that Zubi Diamond had done a lot of research, had personal experience in the market, and seemed to know what he was talking about. This is a book that Republicans and Democrats alike should read. Come to think of it, maybe President Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner also should read Zubi Diamond's new book

-- Emory Daniels

Emory Daniels, book reviewer, freelance writer, web content specialist