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American Green By Ted Steinberg Book Details Paperback March 2007 ISBN 978-0-393-32930-8 6.1 × 8.3 in / 320 pages Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Apartment-dwelling urbanites may be surprised to learn how significant lawn care is to the American economy, generating more than $10 billion in annual sales of pesticides, fertilizers and other products. Steinberg, an environmental historian, is aiming for the grassy equivalent of Fast Food Nation, with one key difference—while people know junk food isn't good for them, they may not be aware that most lawn care products are not only unnecessary but may actually harm soil and turf. He particularly damns the lawnmower industry, revealing how manufacturers "worked tirelessly to mislead the American public" for years in order to avoid the expense of installing safety features that could prevent severed fingers. Steinberg's subjects range from the postwar boom in suburban lawns to contemporary debates over noisy leaf blowers, and he mixes cultural history with personal lawn-related experiences in Long Island and Ohio, where some people maintain putting greens in their backyards. (Not surprisingly, Steinberg points out, golf courses are "the most intensively managed lawns in America.") There's plenty of muckraking outrage, but it's delivered in a friendly, engaging voice that might just win over skeptics. 40 illus. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Infinitely more interesting than watching grass grow, Steinberg's study of grass becomes a rueful and revealing commentary on America's nearly myopic devotion to acquiring and maintaining the perfect lawn. Forget your purple waves of grain; America's predominant landscape feature is a lush carpet of pristine green grass mowed so short it couldn't wave if it wanted to. Tracing the sociological roots of this horticultural phenomenon from the burgeoning post-World War II cookie-cutter suburbs with their postage-stamp lawns to today's manicured, multiacre estates, Steinberg illustrates how and why American home owners have elevated their fascination with this humble plant into an obsessive Grail-like quest. From mowers to blowers, weeds to water, crabgrass to bluegrass, Steinberg dishes the dirt on the products and practices that get results, not all of them in the home owner's--or the planet's--best interest. Balancing his sardonic, tongue-in-cheek wit with an investigative reporter's penchant for revelatory journalism, Steinberg offers an expose that is as entertaining as it is instructive. Carol Haggas Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “Ted Steinberg proves once again that he is a master storyteller as well as our foremost environmental historian.”—Mike Davis The rise of the perfect lawn represents one of the most profound transformations in the history of the American landscape. American Green, Ted Steinberg's witty exposé of this bizarre phenomenon, traces the history of the lawn from its explosion in the postwar suburban community of Levittown to the present love affair with turf colorants, leaf blowers, and riding mowers. “The lawn is the centerpiece of the American Dream, and why wouldn’t we dream about our obsession? In American Green, Ted Steinberg explores the psychological, moral, economic, and, yes, even political implications of growing and mowing a lawn, a not at all academic act that turns out to be a blast. You may never picnic the same way again, but if you do, you will want to talk about it with your city councilman, if not your doctor.” — Robert Sullivan, author of Rats New York Times Book Review Neil Genzlinger Can't We All Get a Lawn? Here is one thing I didn't expect to learn from Ted Steinberg's "American Green": My older brother is lucky to be alive and unmaimed. I have a distinct childhood memory, from about 35 years ago, of watching him drive a new riding lawnmower up the embankment behind our trendy split-level in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Whatever factory produced the mower apparently had never heard of embankments, and so gave the thing a center of gravity that made it about as stable as a 60-pound fifth grader with a 90-pound backpack. It began to tip straight backward, my brother clinging to it like a rodeo rider for a few terrifying moments. He had the good sense to spring to safety before the beast first crushed and then vivisected him, but, as Steinberg notes in a gruesome chapter called "Blades of Thunder," others were not so fortunate during this period. "Some of the early mowers made by Simplicity and Jacobsen had names such as Wonder Boy, the Javelin and the Chief, though perhaps the most accurate moniker would be the Tipster," he writes of riding mowers. The popularity of split-level houses in the postwar years resulted in a lot of banked lawns, and the combination could be deadly, even years after my brother's near evisceration — 213 of the 362 deaths associated with riding mowers from 1987 to 1990 resulted from tipovers. "Though the dangers of riding mowers became apparent as early as the 60's, to this day no federal regulation has dared to rein in the suburban Cyclops," Steinberg adds. He documents manufacturers' resistance to oversight, for both tractors and walk-behinds. A particularly amusing anecdote involves a fight over how gory a warning label for walk-behind mowers would be; the watered-down version that was eventually approved, Steinberg says, "suggests that putting your finger under the deck might result in something like a paper cut." The problem with "American Green" is that the chapter on mower carnage, its most interesting, is really just an extended aside. Steinberg's main focus is America's supposed preoccupation with keeping lawns green and weed-free, and his take on this, though lively, is light on real insight. Generalizations sprout up in this book like — well, you know. Almost everyone in the Eisenhower years had a crew cut, and almost everyone with a crew cut was obsessed about having a perfect, crew-cut lawn. Americans are so dumb and docile that we seem to do whatever Scotts lawn-care advertisements tell us. Along with the generalizations comes a lot of lazy sociology. How to explain the lawn-care boom of the 1950's? "If life at the office entailed an occasional dressing-down from one's superior, at least Dad could come home and wheel out the Lawn-Boy, Dandy Boy or Lazy Boy — brand-name mowers available in the 50's — and show the world who was boss in the yard." Sounds good, but why then, later in the book, has half the country shifted to the "do-it-for-me industry," paying someone else (usually an immigrant) to care for the lawn? Presumably that workplace superior is still dressing down poor Dad, yet he no longer needs the satisfaction of a good mow? There is something more complex going on in America's lawn-care psyche than Steinberg, who teaches history at Case Western Reserve University, addresses. Plenty of lawn-obsessed people read the paper, have college degrees, support the Nature Conservancy; they cannot possibly think the chemicals they dump on their grass are good for their children or wildlife or groundwater, yet they dump them anyway. If you're one of those people, you'll get lots of interesting history and amusing anecdotes in "American Green," but you won't get an explanation for your own self-contradictory behavior quantity :  $CAD 23.00