Real energy solutions for real problems—now! Every day, more people finally “get it.” Global warming is for real and getting worse faster than previously expected. M. King Hubbert’s oil peak looms, and cheap petroleum is a thing of the past. We face an energy crisis. This book tells you what you need to do to meet the challenge. The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook provides a clear-eyed view of the current energy situation and points toward a sustainable path forward. Greg Pahl examines renewable energy technologies currently available and focuses on strategies that can be adopted by individuals and, especially, communities. Such cooperative initiatives have been common in Europe for years and are beginning to gain a foothold in the US because these medium-scale projects successfully bring people together to create collective energy security for a neighborhood, town, or region while strengthening the local economy.

Each chapter focuses on a different renewable energy sector—solar, wind, water, biomass, liquid biofuels, and geothermal—then reviews their advantages and disadvantages and describes numerous examples of proven local initiatives. The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook is an eloquent appeal and a practical handbook for community and regional action to deal head-on with environmental challenges and to take responsibility for energy supplies now controlled by large, distant utilities and consortiums. This is the book for anyone ready to take meaningful steps toward a more sustainable future.

Typical books about preserving garden produce nearly always assume that modern kitchen gardeners will boil or freeze their vegetables and fruits. Yet here is a book that goes back to the future—celebrating traditional but little-known French techniques for storing and preserving edibles in ways that maximize flavor and nutrition. An essential guide to preserving nutritious food, this book deliberately ignores freezing and high-temperature canning in favor of methods that are superior because they are more nutritious and energy efficient—traditional techniques which use salt, oil, sugar, alcohol, vinegar, drying, cold Storage, and lactic Fermentation.

As Eliot Coleman says in his foreword, “Food preservation techniques can be divided into two categories: the modern scientific methods that remove the life from food, and the natural ‘poetic’ methods that maintain or enhance the life in food. The poetic techniques produce … foods that have been celebrated for centuries and are considered gourmet delights today.”

Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning (originally published as Keeping Food Fresh) offers more than 250 easy and enjoyable recipes featuring locally grown and minimally refined ingredients. It is an essential guide for those who seek healthy food for a healthy world. Centre Terre Vivante, an ecological research and education center located in Mens, Domaine de Raud, a region of southeastern France, hosts courses on regenerative gardening and farming, renewable energy, and ecological building techniques. In addition to more than fifty books, Terre Vivante publishes the influential organic gardening magazine Les Quatre Saisons du Jardinage.

In writer/director/star Michael Goorjian’s brilliant film Illusion, Kirk Douglas looks at the Akashic records of his life, and begins a powerful odyssey of redemption. Kirk plays Donald Baines, a bedridden, successful film director who is in the final stages of his life—a life that has been full of financial and career triumphs, but not personal happiness. Surrounded by nurses, he is dying alone, regretting his personal sacrifices. Drifting off to sleep, he is suddenly aware of a presence in his room. Almost instantaneously, the scene shifts to a movie theater where Donald’s bed lies in the middle of a sea of seats. The presence turns out to be Stan, a former editor who has been deceased for quite some time. Stan lovingly explains to Donald that our lives are all stored on what might be viewed as “soul on film.” Stan shows Donald a reel from his own life, which focuses on the son Donald secretly had early in his career yet had never acknowledged—the life that he sees on screen reflects a young man who had been rejected by his father.

Illusion then unfolds as Donald becomes more and more concerned about the life of his son, and where it is inexorably leading. Can he intercede? Can he change the story of his life?

Kirk Douglas gives a powerful, proud, vulnerable, humorous, and, above all, courageous and career-defining performance in Illusion and Michael’s Goorjian’s direction of both Kirk and himself is sensitive, perceptive, dramatic, and completely assured. The result is a powerful, beautiful, and engrossing spiritual film.