Thank goodness for well written Sustainability books!
As a big reader, I periodically post Sustainability book reviews here on the blog. Obviously I am first and foremost providing a resource for you, the reader, but it also forced me to encapsulate the learnings from each book into a couple of paragraphs which reinforced the takeaways (like taking notes in a lecture, it increases the intake of key messages).
But a few years ago, I started finding this a depressing experience. Publishers would send me books for review and I would have to tell them “Sorry, this was unreadable, I can’t make head nor tail of it, so I’d prefer not to write anything about it at all rather than slag it off.”
My biggest disappointment was ‘Values’ by Mark Carney (which I paid for out of my own pocket), lauded to the heavens by the great and the good, but which turned out to be a large and indigestible lump of stodge. As I said in my review, editing it down to half the word count would have made it at least twice as good.
I was worried this was just me becoming a grumpy old man, so I was delighted to have read a trio of really well written Sustainability books, written by podcast guests. These were:
- You Can’t Make Money from a Dead Planet by Mark Shayler
- How to be a Chief Sustainability Officer by Anna Krotova and Jennifer Geary
- Making Sustainability Profitable by Jasper Steinhausen
I haven’t written reviews of these, but you can listen to the interviews via the links above. But the cross cutting feature of all three is that they are all written for the reader. Readability is 100% the most important feature of a book and these authors have nailed it. So, thank you, my faith in the Sustainability book is restored!