Faith Middleton Show: Green Metropolis and A Is For Admission

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability
by David Owen

In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen argues that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but New York, New York.

Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan- the most densely populated place in North America -rank first in public-transit use and last in percapita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation.

These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn't reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world's nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.

A Is for Admission: The Insider's Guide to Getting Into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges
by Michele A. Hernández

For generations, the admissions process of the Ivy League schools and other top colleges has been cloaked in mystery and myth. Now Michele A. Hernandez, a former admissions officer at Dartmouth, finally breaks the ancient code of silence to reveal how the world's most highly selective schools really make their decisions. With absolute candor, Hernandez tells you all the hard truths, provides all the secrets, reveals how admission officers factor in every extenuating circumstance, and, most importantly, she shows you how to make this complex, high-stakes system work for you. Thorough, direct, and written for real results, A Is for Admission answers the questions asked by countless students:

• What do admissions officers really look for and what turns them off?
• How are test scores and grades truly evaluated?
• Does applying for early decision hurt or help you get in to the college of your choice?
• How can you improve the chances of acceptance?