Frank Kaminski

Making Movies - Apr 19

•Mother: Caring for 7 Billion - Teaser - Free Streaming of Director's Cut •Do the Math Documentary Premieres on Earth Night, April 21 •Growing Cities Movie

Review: A Place Beyond Man and The Webs of Varok – the first two books in Cary Neeper’s Archives of Varok series

When Cary Neeper first published excerpts of her novel The Webs of Varok on Resilience.org, one commenter dismissed the work as being “merely a polemic pretending to be a novel.” Only the first charge is correct. The book clearly is an impassioned polemic against the extravagance and destructiveness of industrial society, but it’s hardly “pretending to be a …

Review: A Small American City (new podcast series by Duncan Crary)

For many people, a city means the excitement and the cultural allure—as well as the crowding, pollution and other problems—of an enormous metroplex. Yet that notion of a city is being challenged as more and more people come to appreciate small-city living. The former steel town of Troy, New York offers a case in point. Despite being small, it lays just as much claim to offering …

Review: The Localization Reader, edited by Raymond De Young and Thomas Princen

For general audiences and experts alike, this is an engaging, accessible reader that takes an affirmative social change approach to localization.

Review: Share or Die by Malcolm Harris, Neal Gorenflo and Cory Doctorow

Share or Die is a collection of short writings by those on the front lines of Generation Y.

Review: Starvation Ridge by Risa Stephanie Bear

What geographical area offers the best chance of survival during the coming oil shortage?

Review: Too Much Magic by James Kunstler

...Kunstler has a new work of social criticism titled Too Much Magic, his first nonfiction book since The Long Emergency came out in 2005. The book is an inquiry into a skewed, delusional perception of reality that Kunstler thinks has become “baseline normal for the American public lately.” Americans, he says, have been led astray by the incredible technological advancements of …

Mother: Caring for 7 Billion (documentary film review)

The documentary takes a penetrating look at overpopulation, what fuels it and why the world has become complacent about the issue after making a good start in addressing it during the late 60s. The film dispels some key myths about overpopulation – chief among them the belief that it's long been solved – even if it stops short of admitting the inevitability of a world population …

Review: Was a Time When by Sam Penny

The novel describes a future in which humans have evolved into an entirely new species, the Neu-humans. They are distinguished by their short tails, freckled appearance and super-intelligence—along with a strong tribal sensibility that compels them to tread lightly upon the planet and always make decisions rationally. The story involves an archaeological journey to the “Lands of Oregon,” from …

Review: Falling Through Time by Patricia Comroe Frank

Since its beginnings, the sleeper-awakes scenario has been one of the most commonly used frameworks for introducing fictional utopias and dystopias–yet somehow it doesn't feel overdone. The reason, I suspect, is that the sleep is incidental to the story, the true focus being the new world order and how it compares with the old. That's certainly the case with Patricia Frank's Falling Through …