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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The World Without Us | 3/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:42:27.961021+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Reception == As the book was released Weisman launched his book tour with stops throughout the United States, Canada and overseas to Lisbon and Brussels. Weisman did television interviews on The Daily Show and The Today Show and radio interviews on Weekend Edition, Talk of the Nation, The Diane Rehm Show, Living on Earth, Marketplace, and As It Happens. Meanwhile, the book debuted on the New York Times Best Seller list for non-fiction hardcovers at #10 on July 29 and spent nine weeks in the top ten, peaking at #6 on August 12 and September 9. In the Canadian market, it spent 10 weeks on The Globe and Mail's non-fiction best-seller list, peaking at #3 on August 11. The book reached #1 on the San Francisco Chronicle Best-Sellers list for non-fiction on September 23 and spent 11 weeks on the USA Today's Top 150 Best-Selling Books, peaking at #48. Reviewers at the Library Journal recommended the book for all environmental collections and the audiobook for most public and academic library audiobook collections. The book ranked #1 on Time and Entertainment Weekly's top 10 non-fiction books of 2007 and was listed in the Hudson Booksellers' "Best Books published in 2007". In the Amazon.com "Best Books of 2007", it placed #4 overall in the United States and #1 in the non-fiction category in Canada. The writing style was positively received as being vivid and well written, sometimes grim, but with appropriate language. Even an overall negative review by Michael Grunwald in The Washington Post remarked the writing was "always lucid, sometimes elegant". In The New York Times Book Review Jennifer Schuessler said Weisman has a "flirtation with religious language, his occasionally portentous impassivity giving way to the familiar rhetoric of eco-hellfire". Janet Maslin of The New York Times found the writing had "an arid, plain, what-if style" while being "strangely uniform in tone". On the reporting techniques, Kamiya wrote that "[Weisman's] science reporting, at once lucid and full of wonder ... is the heart and soul of this book" and that it is "written as if by a compassionate and curious observer on another planet". The Plain Dealer book editor Karen Long said Weisman "uses the precise, unhurried language of a good science writer and shows a knack for unearthing unexpected sources and provocative facts". Several critics found the lack of an anthropomorphic point of view hurt the book's relevance. Robert Braile in The Boston Globe wrote that it has "no real context ... no rationale for probing this fantasy other than [Weisman's] unsubstantiated premise that people find it fascinating". Michael Grunwald in The Washington Post also questioned the premise: "Imagining the human footprint on a post-human planet might be fun for dormitory potheads who have already settled the questions of God's existence and Fergie's hotness, but it's not clear why the rest of us need this level of documentary evidence". On the other hand, Alanna Mitchell in the Globe and Mail review found relevance in the context of society's passiveness to resource depletion combined with an anthropomorphic vanity. She writes the "book [is] designed to help us find the how of survival by shaking us out of our passive dance with death". The book's environmental focus was also criticized by some. Christopher Orlet of The American Spectator wrote that it is "a prime example of the wrongheaded, extremist views of the Greens". Braile agrees that the book could be "an environmentalist's nightmare, possibly fueling the cheap shots taken at the green movement ... by critics who say environmentalists care more about nature than people". Environmentalist Alex Steffen found the book presents nothing new, but that using the sudden and clean disappearance of humans provides a unique framework, although extremely unlikely and insensitive. Two critics who call the book a "Jeremiad" ultimately gave it a positive review. The Guardian says "we learn during the course of this book, to feel good about the disappearance of humanity from the Earth". Other critics hailed the environmental perspective. Chauncey Mabe of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel calls the book "one of the most satisfying environmental books of recent memory, one devoid of self-righteousness, alarmism or tiresome doomsaying". Tom Spears of the CanWest News Service concludes "it's more a portrait of ourselves, taken through an odd lens" and "[s]ometimes an obituary is the best biography".