Young Readers Edition

I got my first Al Gore book, The Inconvenient Truth, as a present on the day I defended my dissertation, January 2007. I wasn’t really in touch directly with the climate change issues, or Gore’s Climate Project, but more with the phenomena of appropriate & intermediate technology, community development through design and design development projects, the impacts of (industrial) products to ecological, economic and social-cultural systems, and such. It was much later that I acquired Our Choice, bought at a book shop at Jakarta international airport, I think. By then I was already exposed to a whole lot of things concerning The Climate Project and a variety of campaigns concerning climate change. These two books provide comprehensive explanation about the subject in a pleasant way: clear, very informative, and are rich of images and graphic information. I thought the books couldn’t be much ‘readers-friendlier’, until I found the Young Readers Edition of both.

 

Here are the books, An Inconvenient Truth and Our Choice, along with their Young Readers versions

Although I’ve read only a few pages, these versions are obviously written in a conversational style, in simple words without decreasing the messages, and have the feel of a picture book, also due to the easy font types and sizes.

Pages from the Young Readers Editions

All in all, I’m sure these books will assist me significantly in preparing materials concerning climate change, especially to young audience. To end this post, following is a quote from the Conclusion of Our Choice – Young Readers Edition, that gives the feeling of intimacy, like an uncle telling you a story:

The choices we make now will decide what the world will look like 20 or 30 years from now. Twenty years from now, if I’m still alive, I’ll be an old man. But you’ll be a young adult. […] I know that a lot of information in this book can be frightening. But I still have hope that the world can come together to end the climate crisis, and I really believe it will – when all of us insist on it. I hope that when you’re an adult, you’ll be able to tell the great story of how you saw the world change for the better.