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Whistle Stopper - Raising Baby Green: The Earth-Friendly Guide to Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Baby Care
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List Price: $16.95
Our Price: $8.74
Your Save: $ 8.21 ( 48% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Jossey-Bass
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 618.2
EAN: 9780787996222
ISBN: 078799622X
Label: Jossey-Bass
Manufacturer: Jossey-Bass
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: 2007-09-21
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Studio: Jossey-Bass
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Very informative book and well worth the read
Comment: I think this is a very good to start raising a green baby. I wasn't the most eco-educated person out there, but I tried to do my part. When my wife and I started to try to have a baby, I wanted to have a healthy baby and started to do more research. What I like about this book is that it has a ton of information and resources and all laid out in a logical manner. The book was very easy to read, although I did not read every single page. I took note of a lot of tips (just bought some castile soap from Trader Joe's w/ my reusable bag) and websites. I liked the pages on the chemicals you should not purchase. I actually wrote them on back of my printout of the Environmental Defense Fund Seafood Selector guide. I used that chemicals list to check against sunscreen that I was looking to purchase, which I found that most sunscreens have one or more of those chemicals even the ones that say organics. I won't follow every single advice in the book just because of practicality or cost reasons, but at least I'll be a more educated parent on raising a greener baby. As with every book, you should use your own common sense when following an author's advice.
On a side note, there is so much information out there and sometimes conflicting information. It seems to me that one study will contradict another study that was done just a few months ago!! Case in point is Brenda Murray's review on when to fill-up your car. One study says it doesn't matter and another says it does matter (take a look at the comments on her review). I live in Phoenix and they actually do say you should fill your car up at night (or early morning) not because of air pollution, but because of how the regulators (I think) on the pumps. It actually cost less to fill-up when it the temperature is cooler than when it is hot. I wish I could find the Arizona Republic article that talked more to the technical side of why this is the case and why the state is trying to change the regulators.
Lastly, in Brenda Murray's review, the author (Alan Greene) actually comments on her review. Some people might find this self-serving or being an ego maniac, but I found it very refreshing as he wanted to provide additional insight. I don't know if many authors would do this, but I found it very refreshing for the author to do this and the tone of his comment was not negative or preachy. In my opinion, he does really seem to care about the subject.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Green Family Must-Have!
Comment: I absolutely love this book! As a mother of a two-year-old and one due in October, this book is a must-have for any family wanting to live a healthy, smart, and eco-friendly life. There are small, simple changes suggested in the book we can all easily make as well as less obvious ideas that the average person probably would not be aware of. This easy to read book is straight forward and extremely educational. I have personally recommended Raising Baby Green to several friends, and I wish I had it when I was pregnant with my first child. You don't have to drive a Prius and live off-the-grid to appreciate Dr. Greene's ideas. One of the best on the market!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Not for the thin of wallet
Comment: I was given this book before my baby was born, and I found it to be the most useless parenting book I looked at. It seemed to repeat the same advice over and over again: buy and use everything organic. It even advocated bringing your own organic cotton sheets to the hospital for childbirth and demanding that they be used instead of regular hospital linens. The author advocated buying everything organic, from food to clothing, which is all well and good if you can afford to do so, but he didn't point to any less expensive ways of doing things. Even his tips on recycling older baby furniture seemed to be aimed at parents with unlimited budgets.
To be fair, I didn't read every page, but I did throw it across the room more than once by the time I gave up!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Just use the Internet
Comment: Unless you hate the Internet, just do research online for free instead. I didn't read anything in here that I couldn't have found on the Internet.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Isn't Thrift a Green Quality, too?
Comment: Raising Baby Green was easy and quick to read and is a book I will keep around simply for the fact that Dr. Greene has put together an impressive resource guide of websites where one can find lots of information on greening one's life and home. I'm sure this book will be a great reference in the future when I'm looking to buy something, that being said, I had two problems with this book.
First, after about the second chapter this book starts to read like an advertisement to buy buy buy! For example, there is repeated references to bringing you own organic cotton sheets to wherever you give birth and using them to replace the sheets at the hospital/birthing center. Now call me pragmatic, but 300 count organic cotton sheets cost between $125-$175 for my bed, thus, these are not the ideal sheets TO GIVE BIRTH ON. They will be ruined and I know when I'm expecting a baby I don't generally have $175 dollars to throw away. Nor does he address the impracticality of packing home sheets covered in birth mess for washing.
While Dr. Green does repeatedly say you can do as little or as much greening as you like in your home, he really does seem to push for more. There comes a point when ripping up your current hardwoods floors which are perfectly good to put down new floors made from cork which is a renewable resource stops being green. If you gut your entire house to "remodel green" the question becomes, are you really being green? Or are you just buying into the latest fad and wasting valuable, usable resources?
This green baby guide seems to have bought into our consumer culture hook, line and sinker, which is the reason I was going to give it 4 stars, but I dropped that down to 3 stars when I ran into my second problem with this book: Mis-information.
On page 248 there is a section titled "How to Drive Green." Two of the suggestions given are changing your air filter (which he says will save you $130 in fuel economy) and filling your tank at night. Now if you google "10 gas saving myths" you will find several articles about, well, gas saving myths and both of these are on there. Neither filling up at night nor changing your air filter really increase you fuel economy.
Green goes on further to say that filling up at night, "decreases evaporation during pumping, so anything that escapes won't be cooked in to the ozone." So, those fumes I see/smell when I pump gas at night don't go into the ozone? Because it's night? So . . .where do they go? To the pub for a beer?
If Greene has mis-information about fuel economy in his book that can be disputed by a simple google search, it makes me wonder what else he got wrong.
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Editorial Reviews:
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In this illustrated and easy-to-use guide, noted pediatrician Dr. Alan Greene, a leading voice of the green baby movement, advises parents how to make healthy green choices for pregnancy, childbirth, and baby care—from feeding your baby the best food available to using medicines wisely. Consumer advocate Jeanette Pavini includes information for making smart choices and applying green principles to a whole new universe of products from zero-VOC paints for the nursery, to pure and gentle lotions for baby’s delicate skin, to the eco-friendly diapers now in the marketplace, as well as specific recommendations for hundreds of other products.
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