#1. The World Without Us
by Alan Weisman
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
320 pages
$24.95

A thought-experiment: What would become of the earth if humanity were to softly and silently and suddenly vanish away? What starts as a morbid parlor game becomes a mesmerizing and grandly entertaining meditation on how horrifically humanity has managed to perturb our little planet, and with what wonderful blithe resilience said planet will shrug off all our works once we're gone. Weisman writes like Malcolm Gladwell and John McPhee mashed together and set on fast-forward in this spirit-enlarging, screech-free hymn to the environment.