In celebration of National Library Week I am reviewing and listing books on a topic as encouragement to seek more books at your library!
The Bike to Work Guide: What You Need to Know to Save Gas, Go Green, Get Fit
Aadapted from The Everything Bike Book c1998, this book is 9 chapters and 218 pages including appendices and index.
I picked up this book with Laura’s Carbon Footprint and my former coworker in Lexington in mind wondering if they read it. In Lexington, it always impressed me that they had bike lanes around the University of Kentucky campus and downtown, probably because I did not see much of this in the ‘burbs of Cincinnati.
This book starts off with why commute by bicycle, how bikes work, types of bicycles, selecting the right one and then gets into an area I am interested in the logistics. As in, if you wear a skirt at work how does that work on your bike? The authors say some may use a bike garment bag, others may leave clothes at work using a nearby dry-cleaner.
Moving along, it covers a very important topic that has kept a few
coworkers from biking to work and that safety. I learned that on narrow roads, bicyclists should ride middle of the lane when necessary letting the car switch lanes if it wishes. This is the law in most states. Sometimes it is in the interest of safety for bikers to hold up cars. [I’ll be honest, my parents live toward the country where bikers drive out to bike on the weekends, I doubt many motorist know that’s the case, but then again, I’ve never seen a bicyclists use hand signals listed in this book, which I also learned in Girl Scouts, even when approaching an intersection. I have seen them when being passed by bicyclists on trails, though.]
This book addresses all the questions I think I would have if I was considering biking to work or even if I was going to buy a bike and start biking around on the weekends because it starts with picking your bike and ends with maintaining. One appendix touches on bicycle advocacy and what bicyclists can do.
Greening Your Office: From Cupboard to Corporation, An A-Z Guide
This is a small book by Jon Clift & Amanda Cuthbert is under 70 pages and has decent ideas for small businesses, but I cannot see any of the bigger offices I have worked in getting on board with many of these ideas. Maybe if the decision maker was reading this book and decided to make an action plan to instruct the whole staff how things would be, I could see it working, but who is going to opt for the manual shredder? [Although i would totally be on board with the shredder scissors, but that’s just me]
I first picked it up to see what it is said about vending machines since we have six in our building that run about 12 hours while our building is closed. It did not mention the one thing we now have installed,a vending machine miser, which puts the machine into sleep mode when not in use. The nice thing about books like this is you pick them up from the library, read them at lunch and return them. Talk about greening your reading list!
Note: This review was made possible by checking books out from my local libraries. No compensation was provide to me for this review.
