How American, British, and European policies have conspired to keep Africa hungry—and a plan for how this 21st-century famine can finally be overcome.

For more than thirty years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet while the “Green Revolution” succeeded in South America and Asia, it never reached Africa. More than nine million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every year—most of them in Africa and most of them children. More die of hunger in Africa than from AIDS and malaria combined. Now, an impending global food crisis threatens to make things worse.

In the West we think of famine as a natural disaster, brought about by drought or as the legacy of brutal dictators. But in this powerful investigative narrative, Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman show exactly how, in the past few decades, American, British, and European self-interest and neglect have left Africa unable to feed itself. As a new generation of activists work to stop famine from spreading, Enough is essential reading on a humanitarian issue of utmost urgency.

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An unsparing, tragic novel of the lost American dream—and of the redemptive power of love and friendship.

Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation—as well as the acts of friendship, loyalty, and love—that arise from its loss. From local bars to train yards to prison, it is the story of two young men, bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them, who dream of a future beyond the factories and abandoned homes.

Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother commits suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown. But when he finally sets out to leave for good, accompanied by his temperamental best friend, former high school football star Billy Poe, they are caught up in a terrible act of violence that changes their lives forever.

Evoking John Steinbeck’s novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, American Rust takes us into the contemporary American heartland at a moment of profound unrest and uncertainty about the future. It is a dark but lucid vision, a moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendence and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.

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A challenging, controversial, and highly readable argument that the greenest community in the United States is New York City.

Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, wastelands of concrete, garbage, diesel fumes, and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, David Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan—the most densely populated place in North America—rank first in public-transit use and last in per capita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation.

These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn’t reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.

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The cataclysmic changes in the lives of American women over the past fifty years—a story New York Times columnist Gail Collins was born to tell.

Picking up where her critically acclaimed 2003 book, America’s Women, left off, Gail Collins explores the enormous strides—and the rare setbacks—that women have experienced since 1960. “Hell yes, we have a quota [7 percent]” said a medical school dean in 1961. “We do keep women out, when we can.” At a pre-graduation party at Barnard College, Collins reports, “they handed corsages to the girls who were engaged and lemons to those who weren’t.” Until 1972, no woman ran in the Boston Marathon, the year when Title IX passed, requiring parity for boys and girls in school athletic programs. In 1960, two-thirds of women 18–60 surveyed by Gallup didn’t approve of the idea of a female president, and it wasn’t until 2008 that Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first woman to win a presidential primary.

Collins’s interviews with women who have lived through these transformative years include an advertising executive in the ’60s who was not allowed to attend board meetings that took place in the all-male dining room, and an airline stewardess who remembered being required to bend over to light her passengers’ cigars on the men-only “Executive Flight” from New York to Chicago.

A comprehensive mix of oral history and keen research, When Everything Changed is the definitive book about five crucial decades of progress, told with the down-to-earth, amusing, and agenda-free tone this beloved New York Times columnist is known for.

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A 2009 report by Trinity College researchers based on the American Religious Identification Survey 2008 profiles the “no religion population” and finds that they are no longer a fringe group. The no religion segment of the U.S. population, or “Nones,” far exceed the combined total of all the non-Christian religious groups in the U.S. and is likely to increase as non-religious young people replace older religious people. This report aims to profile the Nones and try to predict their likely impact on where society is headed.

Among the report’s more interesting highlights were:

• 1 in 6 Americans is presently of No Religion in terms of Belonging (self-identification).
• 1 in 4 Americans is presently of No Religion in terms of Belief and Behavior.
• 15 percent of the total adult U.S. population self-identify as Nones or 34 million adults.
• 22 percent of Americans aged 18-29 years self-identify as Nones.
• 660,000 the annual increase of adult Americans joining the ranks of Nones since 2001. The number has halved from 1.3 million annually in the 1990s.
• 59 percent of Nones identify as agnostics and deists rather than atheists or theists.
• 61 percent of Nones believe in human evolution while 38 percent of the general American public believes in human evolution.
• 60:40 the gender ratio among male and female Nones (19 percent of American men are Nones while 12 percent of American women are Nones).
• 32 percent of current Nones report they were None by age 12, making most Nones first generation.
• 21 percent of the nation’s Independents are Nones.
• 16 percent of the nation’s Democrats are Nones.
• 8 percent of the nation’s Republicans are Nones.

Iran’s Nuclear Program

“I do not think… Iran has an on-going nuclear weapons program. Whether they have done some weaponization studies, as was claimed by the US and others, this is one of the issues that are still outstanding.”

- Mohamed ElBaradei, the outgoing director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, regarding the lack of credible evidence to suggest that Iran has a military nuclear program. (Press TV) However, British intelligence is reporting it believes Iran has resumed work on designing a nuclear warhead. (Telegraph)

*Related Title: The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, by David E. Sanger

Al Qaeda Back on its Heels

“[Al-Qaeda] hasn’t really made a connection to a new generation.”

- Richard Barrett, head of the United Nations’ al-Qaeda and Taliban monitoring group, in a speech Tuesday on al-Qaeda’s reduced effectiveness and loss of credibility among potential supporters and recruits. (Washington Post)

*Related Title: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright

Pakistani Terror Group Ascendant

“The only cooperation we have with the Pakistanis is that they send us their terrorists, who kill our people, and we kill their terrorists.”

- A senior Indian intelligence official said regarding India-Pakistan relations. Despite pledges to work together to combat terrorism, the Pakistani and Indian intelligence services are not on speaking terms. The Lashkar-e-taiba, the group of Pakistan-based militants responsible for last years attacks in Mumbai, is said to be intact and capable of mobilizing quickly for an elaborate attack that could destabalize this volatile region. (New York Times)

*Related Title: The Limits of Power, Andrew J. Bacevich

Prospects for the Public Option

“The only way we are going to get this done is with active involvement of the president.”

- A Democratic Senate aide on President Obama’s central role in healthcare reform as Democrats look to Obama as the final arbiter of the public option after the Senate Finance Committee voted down two Democratic amendments to add the public option to the final bill on Tuesday. (Politico)

*Related Title: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform, by Howard Dean, with Igor Volsky and Faiz Shakir

The Supreme Court Reconvenes

“There’s no question that if the court applies the Second Amendment to the states that will encourage more challenges to gun laws. But when the dust clears, it is quite likely this decision will leave intact virtually all the state laws out there.”

- Dennis Henigan, a vice president at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to return to the controversy over individual gun rights as they hear an appeal from a group of firearms owners in Chicago. (USA Today)

*Related Title: The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin

To mark Banned Books Week, the American Library Association has put together a fantastic interactive map of book censorship. The data are drawn from cases documented by ALA and the Kids’ Right to Read Project, a collaboration of the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. Details are available in ALA’s “Books Banned and Challenged 2007-2008,” (PDF)  and “Books Banned and Challenged 2008-2009,” and the “Kids’ Right to Read Project Report.”

View Book Bans and Challenges, 2007-2009 in a larger map

In honor of Banned Books Week, the annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment held during the last week of September, the American Library Association (ALA) is holding a series of events as well as mapping book bans and challenges in schools and libraries across the U.S. in 2007-2009.

The ALA is featuring books that have been targets of attempted banning for reasons ranging from homosexuality to religious viewpoint and offensive language while celebrating the librarians, teachers, and community members who fight to retain such books in library collections. Below are the top ten most frequently challenged books of 2008:

1. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
2. His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman
3. TTYL; TTFN; L8R, G8R (series), by Lauren Myracle
4. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
5. Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya
6. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
7. Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily von Ziegesar
8. Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, by Sarah S. Brannen
9. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
10. Flashcards of My Life, by Charise Mericle Harper

Additionally, a new Banned Books Week PSA has been released by the ALA to kick off the events, featuring the puppets from “Crash Pad.” Check it out below.

Head to the Banned Books Week website for more information on events, such as readings by authors of six of the ten most challenged books of 2008, as well as what you can do to take-action and fight censorship in your community.

In “Simple Prosperity: Finding Real Wealth In a Sustainable Lifestyle,” author David Wann warns that a looming energy crunch will begin to affect our quality of life sooner than we might expect.

Wann points out that three-fourths of consumer goods today are made from fossil fuels. With the demand for these non-renewable resources quickly outpacing supply and prices rising in turn, people everywhere will very soon find themselves forced to make drastic lifestyle changes.

If a crisis is to be stemmed, consumers need to start rethinking their behavior now – specifically, how much energy they dispose of in their own homes. Wann, an environmentalist and proud do-it-yourselfer, offers suggestions on how individuals can cut their household energy use in half. Some of his tips are:

• Install a programmable thermostat for heating and cooling, and learn how to use it. Each degree below 68° F during colder weather saves 3 to 5 percent more heating energy. Conversely, keeping your thermostat at 78° during hot weather will also save you money.
• Set the refrigerator thermostat at between 37° and 40°, and clean the condenser coils twice a year to raise efficiency up to 30 percent.
• Wash clothes in warm or cold water instead of hot, and air-dry them rather than using an electric dryer. Same goes for dishes.
• Turn the water heater down to 120° and insulate the pipes that exit your tank.
• Bake in ceramic or glass pans that hold the heat more tightly and require 25° less heat. Better still, try to use a Crock-pot, toaster oven, microwave or stove before resorting to the oven.
• Don’t just turn off your appliances, but unplug them. Even electronics in off-mode may use “phantom power” when connected to an outlet.

A regular sampling of the best articles, reviews, essays, and reviews from around the web.

Speed Read: The top 11 revelations of Taylor Branch’s Clinton Tapes (The Daily Beast)

* Related Title: Giving by Bill Clinton

50 Economics Ideas You Really Need to Know (The Telegraph)

* Related Title: The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 by Paul Krugman

All You Need to Know About the 2009 Booker Prize (Guardian)

* Related Title: Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America by Jay Parini

A Conversation with William Safire (Fresh Air with Terry Gross)

* Related Title: Nixonland by Rick Perlstein

The Waxing and Waning of America’s Political Right (New York Times)

* Related Title: Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party by Max Blumenthal