The Underground Gators is a delightful, imaginative story about NYC alligators that also explains such mysteries as to why school buses are yellow and socks go missing from the washing machine. Booklist writes:

This slapstick picture book begins by dispelling the urban myth about alligators living in the sewers of New York City: “To be honest, nobody has ever really seen them.” Then Casey hedges a bit. Just because there hasn’t been an eyewitness, she reasons, doesn’t mean that the alligators aren’t there. Together, Casey and Munsinger try to make a case for the ’gators’ existence, and the result is this over-the-top, comedic offering. All kinds of mysteries can be explained, it seems, by adding the alligator angle. Why are manholes round? So that the pizzas that alligators love to order can be easily passed through. What do babysitters do after kids go to bed? They play cards with alligators. There is a lot more silliness than sense here, but Munsinger makes it work in hilarious scenes of the endearingly goofy reptiles marching through the human world, from summer school to a child’s bedroom, where they stand in for the tooth fairy.

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Consider the gift of a green book this Holiday season.

Ecobrain, a green publishing company offers ebooks, the ideal green reading choice.  Ebooks can be instantly downloaded to your desktop. Ecobrain has a series of ebooks that make ideal reading for Ecopreneurs.

The Next Sustainability Wave: Building Boardroom Buy-in, by Bob Willard ($16.95)

This book provides a compelling business case emphasizing the importance of how sustainability is presented to corporate leaders. It applies effective selling techniques to reposition sustainability strategies as a means to achieving existing corporate ends, rather than as a separate priority to worry about. It sells sustainability as a solution, a business strategy, and a catalyst for business transformation.

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I was wrong.

In Memory of Central Park follows in the tradition of the great works of dystopian fiction: Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. Set in New York City in 2050, the novel’s protagonist and narrator Noah is a psychotherapist with plenty of issues of his own. He’s in love with his brother’s wife Margaret. He struggles with unresolved resentment about his relationship with his deceased father. And he, along with the other characters, live in a city that’s not only seceded from the United States, but has also encapsulated itself in a huge dome in order to protect itself from terrorism and other outside threats.

As you might imagine in this environment, Noah stays pretty busy with his psychotherapy practice. Though skilled at helping other resolve some of their own emotional problems, he’s distant from those around him.  His eventual affair with Margaret fails because he’s unwilling to allow her to leave Adam, her successful and politically-connected husband, and move in with him (Noah, like many of the residents of the city, lives in a single room). He’s frustrated because, despite his best efforts, he can’t seem to help a difficult patient who’s obviously dying. And he just doesn’t get the ideas underlying “clown show” performances by an underground street theater group that seems to pop up everywhere.

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NOBODY NoSE WheRE theY CamE from.

BUT THEY’RE HERE, HAND-PICKED TO SAVE the WORLD.

BEFORE BEDTIME.

BeCauSE EVERY NOW and AGAIN,

MOTHER NATURE NEEDS SOMEONE

TO PICK-IT FOR THE PLANET

The BUGZ don’t condone nose picking…destruction of the forests or any other anti-social habits.

I absolutely love the illustrations in these books and the fact that the destruction of the forest is considered anti-social behavior (would someone please tell the Bush administration?); however, the resolutions in the stories don’t really work with the environmental problems they are trying to solve. The end page of each book is filled with “facterias” that I wish were more part of the plot of each environmental adventure. 

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My son, like many boys, adores trucks. He enjoyed William is Going Green when his sister read it to her, but there is one thing about the story I find a bit awkward. I do think that city garbage trucks should have hybrid motors, but as mentioned in the book, the cost to convert a truck is expensive and not readily available. William’s reward for rescuing a cat is not the solution for most city garbage trucks, and I think it is a little misleading to children who really want to see change. Perhaps there is another way William could have gotten a new hybrid motor from recycling proceeds, donations, gas taxes, etc. Maybe I am too much of a realist, but I like my green children’s fiction to address the realities of environmental change. This part of the story didn’t bother my children at all, and they really did like it.

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Then it’s off to the checkout where we’ve all been before. I hand over My Bag and say, “Paper and plastic no more!” We feel really good when our shopping is done. We’ve saved so many bags by using this one!

My Bag and Me! comes with a reusable, small shopping bag. My only criticism is that the bag is made from Tyvek, a Dupont product. Dupont doesn’t exactly have a clean environmental record, and Tyvek is not as long lasting or washable as a cloth shopping bag. Furthermore, the bag and book both claim to be 100% recyclable, although I’ve never seen Tyvek accepted at a recycling center, and neither bag nor book are made from post consumer content.

500 billion paper and plastic bags are used each year globally! These “free” bags actually cost $4 billion dollars a year, and thus consumers pay the price for them in other ways. It is also staggering to consider that it takes 1,000 years for a plastic bag to decompose, and we have all seen the litter they create.

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Sometimes my children join in, sometimes they just explore the yew grove. Last winter, my hugging yew tree fell over after a great snow fall. I still hug it, and it is still alive, but I must lean over to hug my tree now.

My daughter can definitely relate to My Mom Hugs Trees, written by Robyn Ringgold and illustrated by Vidya Vasudevan. This rhyming book is the story of a mother that not only hugs trees, but she talks to plants, rescues bugs instead of killing them, plants seeds from the fruit they eat, asks the flowers if she can pick them, etc. OK, she’s a hippie!

After bedtime stories, Mom says good night to the moon and stars. “Good night, Moon. Good night, Stars. Thank you for your light from afar.

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When she was old enough to realize that an animal was harmed for her food, she made the choice to join me in a vegetarian lifestyle. She was the only vegetarian in her kindergarten class. Now, her best friend has become a vegetarian and her teacher is a vegan. Thus, she was very excited to read a book about a vegetarian dragon!

Herb, the Vegetarian Dragon, written by Jules Bass and illustrated by Debbie Harter, is the tale of the only pacifist, vegetarian dragon in the forest of Nogard. The other dragons ate royal princess, brave knights, and wild boar meat, but Herb had his own vegetable patch. When all the dragons fled to hide from the brave knights who decided to retaliate and capture all of the dragons, Herb was mistakenly imprisoned as one of the meat eating, killing dragons. While he was incarcerated, the other dragons tried to tempt him to eat meat:

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Herb said. “I don’t see it your way, so I’ll take my chances. I don’t ask you to stop eating meat, so why do you ask me to stop eating vegetables?”

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