As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial | 
 enlarge | Author: Derrick Jensen
Creator: Stephanie Mcmillan
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $8.97
You Save: $5.98 (40%)
New (23) Used (11) from $7.07
Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 114299
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 0.7
ISBN: 1583227776
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.7
EAN: 9781583227770
ASIN: 1583227776
Publication Date: November 19, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New. Delivery is usually 5 - 8 working days from order, International is by Royal Mail Airmail
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Product Description
Two of America's most talented activists team up to deliver a bold and hilarious satire of modern environmental policy in this fully illustrated graphic novel. The US government gives robot machines from space permission to eat the earth in exchange for bricks of gold. A one-eyed bunny rescues his friends from a corporate animal testing laboratory. And two little girls figure out the secret to saving the world from both of its enemies (and it isn't by using energy-efficient light bulbs or biodiesel fuel). As the World Burns will inspire you to do whatever it takes to stop ecocide before it's too late. Derrick Jensen, activist, author, and philosopher, is the author of Endgame, volumes one and two; A Language Older Than Words; and The Culture of Make Believe (a finalist for the 2003 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize), among other books. Jensen's writing has been described as "breaking and mending the reader's heart" (Publishers Weekly). Activist and artist Stephanie McMillan began syndicating her daring political cartoons in 1999. Since then her work has appeared in dozens of publications and has been exhibited in museums across the country. A book based on her comic strip, Minimum Security, was published in 2005.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 A Hugely Depressing Cartoon August 30, 2008
Very depressing. Makes a clear case that corporate fixes for our doomed civilization are so muuch hogwash. You know, the fixes that urge us to buy new light bulbs and others seen on various corporate green ads. Oh, the one where a woman urges us to respect her company because it "keeps us moving" as if that were a great human need in a polluted world under constant onslaught from global warming storms, fires, and droughts.
Should be given to everyone who likes comics instead of non-fiction books.
Easily digestible politics for the planet August 27, 2008
With this graphic novel, Derrick and Stephanie demolish the absurdities and myths of the environmental movement in a provocative and hilarious fashion. They butt heads directly with the hypocrisies of dogmatic pacifists and green technophiles, much to their chagrin, but to people who love the land with an open mind, this is a great introduction to a depressing but necessary way of where we are, and where we need to go.
 Good message, crude presentation August 8, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
I like the spirit and overall message of this little book: that the global climate crisis simply won't be solved by individual consumers turning down their thermostats or rotating their tires. These sorts of strategies, beloved by both liberals and capitalists, do nothing to change the economic and political structures that allow for environmental devastation in the first place, and very little to fix the problem of environmental destruction in the second. What's needed for radical problems are radical solutions.
I get that, and I endorse it. But the way in which Jensen and McMillan have presented the position is so crudely written and drawn that I find this book more embarrassing than enlightening or inspiring.
The plot is simple: because liberal do-gooders are ineffective at stopping environmental destruction (here represented by life-devouring robotic aliens who've bought franchises to the planet from the powers-that-be), nature herself--in the form of animals--fights back. Drastic resistance is the remedy, not getting celebrities to raise funds.
Stephanie McMillan, the artist, uses characters that were born in her political comic strip "Minimum Security." McMillan either has nearly no talent as an artist or she chooses to draw in an irritating faux-primitive style. In either case, her artwork here is even sloppier and unpleasing than in her strip. It looks as if she slapped the stuff out while watching television or clipping her toenails. It's genuinely bad.
To compound the calamity, Jensen's prose is heavy-handed, didactic, and progressively tedious. The bad guys are nothing but evil, in the best silent movie villain style; the naive liberals are laughable in their naivete (although one of them, who throughout the book has mainly played straight man....er, gal, finally gets converted); the good guys are good all the way through. There's no finesse, no suggestion that the people who benefit from an exploitive system might not also be victims in at least some way, no hint that liberal do-gooders might actually do some good. There's just black-and-white, good guy-bad guy thinking throughout.
Look: we do need a revolution. We do need radical change to save the planet. We do need more action and less letter-writing. But we don't need this sorry little book.
One and a half stars.
 Poorly drawn, heavy-handed advocation of violence August 5, 2008
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
This poorly drawn, heavy-handed graphic novel advocates responding to our environmental problems with a violent overthrow of civilization. The authors' ideas are utterly ridiculous and unworkable unless of course you don't mind practically ending civilization and the elimination of much of the human population that would result from a return to the supposed utopian lifestyle that the authors advocate. I wonder... are the authors living in shacks or cabins somewhere that they built themselves while growing all their own food, providing their own water, etc.?
Environmentalism is great. The measures pushed in this book are simply insane and the advocation of violence is particularly disturbing. In the words of Jack Nicholsan's character in "As Good as It Gets", sell crazy someplace else. We're all stocked up here.
 An angry parable July 30, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
It's hard to be angry, truly angry, and funny. Jensen and McMillan try to be both in this book, but they come across as more angry than funny. There is some funny satire, especially of psychologists, but many attempts at humor rest on stereotypes such as policemen with mustaches, greedy CEOs, or politicians who have long since sold out to the system.
This book is built around a good basic idea: alien robots come to devour the earth, discover that corporations already have a license to do this, and then need to get the licenses themselves. They achieve this by giving politicians gold bars, which happen to be the robots' excrement, both abundant and useless. The environmental movement launches an all-but-worthless campaign to stop the oppose, but an alliance of animals and sympathetic humans eventually rises up to stop the aliens, corporations, and politicians.
As is obvious from the Amazon description, this is a graphic novel - - that is, what we old folks would have called a comic book. The comic is crudely drawn. It does not compare favorably to the manga books that my kids have around the house, and the drawing style is more in the style of (dare I say it?) "Captain Underpants." I know that the crude style is intentional, but as a reader of a certain age, I found it distracting.
The text presents many of Derrick Jensen's ideas effectively: the destructiveness of civilization; the evil of corporations; the complicity of psychologists, police, and big media, among many many others; and the ineffectiveness of the traditional Left. Some points are simplistic, ideological screeds, while others are interesting, even challenging.
Readers of Jensen's other work will not be surprised to learn that Jensen and McMillan mock nonviolent strategies, and not without reason. But their vision of violence in this book is simplistic - - merely by killing the evil robots and their corporate stooges, civilization ends and nature is saved. A little reflection on the French or Russian Revolutions, among others, would suggest that killing the bad guys may not accomplish what you want it to accomplish.
Rating: 4 for text, 3 for graphics (not my taste) and humor (not enough); because it's intended as a synthetic work, round down. But it's still worth reading.
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