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Not So Rich As You Think
Not so rich as you think
Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
16 people want to read
About the author
George R. Stewart
74 books204 followersGeorge Rippey Stewart was an American toponymist, a novelist, and a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his only science fiction novel Earth Abides (1949), a post-apocalyptic novel, for which he won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951. It was dramatized on radio's Escape and inspired Stephen King's
The Stand
.
His 1941 novel Storm , featuring as its protagonist a Pacific storm called Maria, prompted the National Weather Service to use personal names to designate storms and inspired Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe to write the song "They Call the Wind Maria" for their 1951 musical "Paint Your Wagon." Storm was dramatized as "A Storm Called Maria" on a 1959 episode of ABC's Disneyland. Two other novels, Ordeal by Hunger (1936) and Fire (1948) also evoked environmental catastrophes.
Stewart was a founding member of the American Name Society in 1956-57, and he once served as an expert witness in a murder trial as a specialist in family names. His best-known academic work is Names on the Land A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (1945; reprinted, New York Review Books, 2008). He wrote three other books on place-names, A Concise Dictionary of American Place-Names (1970), Names on the Globe (1975), and American Given Names (1979). His scholarly works on the poetic meter of ballads (published under the name George R. Stewart, Jr.), beginning with his 1922 Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia, remain important in their field.
His 1959 book Pickett's Charge is a detailed history of the final attack at Gettysburg.
His 1941 novel Storm , featuring as its protagonist a Pacific storm called Maria, prompted the National Weather Service to use personal names to designate storms and inspired Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe to write the song "They Call the Wind Maria" for their 1951 musical "Paint Your Wagon." Storm was dramatized as "A Storm Called Maria" on a 1959 episode of ABC's Disneyland. Two other novels, Ordeal by Hunger (1936) and Fire (1948) also evoked environmental catastrophes.
Stewart was a founding member of the American Name Society in 1956-57, and he once served as an expert witness in a murder trial as a specialist in family names. His best-known academic work is Names on the Land A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (1945; reprinted, New York Review Books, 2008). He wrote three other books on place-names, A Concise Dictionary of American Place-Names (1970), Names on the Globe (1975), and American Given Names (1979). His scholarly works on the poetic meter of ballads (published under the name George R. Stewart, Jr.), beginning with his 1922 Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia, remain important in their field.
His 1959 book Pickett's Charge is a detailed history of the final attack at Gettysburg.
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November 3, 2014
Not so Rich as You Think is a staid environmentalist rant, interesting for its late 1960’s perspective, if not necessarily for its predictions – such as the phasing out of the gasoline engine by 1980. It is a call to arms, or at least a call to action: we, all of us, are destroying our country and are headlong on course to the disaster of uninhabitability, disease, and death. Pretty strong stuff for 1968 – and all true.
Stewart, in his sound, clean style, is a good match for the material. He clearly sets out the issues, while avoiding emotional arguments, which might color the information – a good approach to subject matter than engenders passion on both sides. For every type of pollution, no matter how egregious-seeming, there are multiple perspectives.
The book identifies ten major types of contamination, discusses their history and sources, and offers a few potential remedies. Of particular note is that primary among causes is affluence: those with money need not carefully conserve scraps of foil or spread manure as fertilizer – they simply discard used articles and waste, and buy what they need.
In sum, this is a volume only an author with a following would pen, for he knows there will be readers: Stewart leverages his fans to get the word out. He wasn’t the first to do so, and he won’t be the last. Nonetheless, this is a highly readable caution, and one which retains relevance today, if not to the degree it did when the writer presented it.
Stewart, in his sound, clean style, is a good match for the material. He clearly sets out the issues, while avoiding emotional arguments, which might color the information – a good approach to subject matter than engenders passion on both sides. For every type of pollution, no matter how egregious-seeming, there are multiple perspectives.
The book identifies ten major types of contamination, discusses their history and sources, and offers a few potential remedies. Of particular note is that primary among causes is affluence: those with money need not carefully conserve scraps of foil or spread manure as fertilizer – they simply discard used articles and waste, and buy what they need.
In sum, this is a volume only an author with a following would pen, for he knows there will be readers: Stewart leverages his fans to get the word out. He wasn’t the first to do so, and he won’t be the last. Nonetheless, this is a highly readable caution, and one which retains relevance today, if not to the degree it did when the writer presented it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review