More great news for Chris Steiner and $20 per Gallon, as he was on The Today Show this morning. Here’s the clip. Congratulations, Chris!

Chris Steiner’s fantastic book $20 per Gallon published yesterday and is generating plenty of positive attention. He was on NPR’s Talk of the Nation yesterday, and has reviews published in Publisher’s Weekly, Newsweek, the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Chris’ publisher Grand Central has gotten behind the book in a big way as well, running significant ads yesterday in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. And here’s a snippet from a TIME Magazine piece that ran yesterday, as well:

In researching this book, what surprised you the most?

Perhaps nothing more than some of the paths our food takes around the world: Norwegian Salmon, for instance, can go from Scandinavian fishing boats to China, where the fish are gutted and cleaned by workers making so little the cost is almost negligible. From there, the fish travel back to their home country, neatly packaged as “local” to smitten shoppers in Norway’s supermarkets.

You mention the relative successes of Shai Agassi, of A Better Place, and Tom Casten, of Recycled Energy Development. What’s been holding back other people with big ideas about energy efficiency?

Congratulations, Chris!

Author Chris Steiner spoke today with Newsweek about his incredible book $20 per Gallon, which is hitting stores now. Here’s a snippet:

In his new book, $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better,Forbes writer Christopher Steiner argues that the increasing cost of fuel will radically change the way we live, from the cities we choose to call home to the way we grow food. NEWSWEEK’S Nancy Cook spoke to Steiner about why he thinks Americans will be forced to restrict plane travel to once a year at most, why solar panels will line the rooftops of apartments, and how gas prices will force suburbanites back into cities. Excerpts:
Cook: What prompted you to write a book that looks so far into the future?
Steiner: The genesis came about a year ago when gas was $4.50 and $5 a gallon. It just got to a point when people who drive a lot were approaching the $1,000 mark a month for their gas. You couldn’t get rid of an SUV. I said to myself, “This price of gas is clearly a psychological trigger that totally got people to change their minds. What other trigger points lie ahead?”

Here’s a link to the complete piece. Congratulations, Chris!

Here’s an interesting CNet piece with author and security guru (and the world’s most famous former hacker) Kevin Mitnick. Here’s a snippet:

Do you feel that your hacking has led to positive change in some way?
Yes. It led to my career. Today I speak around world, I do pen testing all the time–and deep penetration testing, where I go after the most sensitive credentials at a company to see if I can get to the crown jewels. I see what I can do as an ethical hacker. I really enjoy this work because when is it that you can take a criminal activity, legitimize it, and get paid for it? Ethical hacking. It’s not like you can be a drug dealer and go work for Walgreens…A lot of pen testers today have done unethical things in their past during their learning process, especially the older ones because there was no opportunity to learn about security. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, it was all self-taught. So a lot of the old-school hackers really learned on other people’s systems. And at the time, I couldn’t even afford my own computer. A dumb terminal was like $2,000. A 1,200-baud modem was like $1,200. The cost of this technology was out of my range as a high school student so I used to go to local universities and use their system, albeit without their knowledge, to learn.

Here’s another excellent review of Flat Broke in the Free Market, this time from the Las Vegas Business Journal.

And Powell’s posted an original essay of Jon’s, which you can see here that talks about what made him decide to write the book. It’s fascinating stuff.

Chris Steiner’s fantastic book $20 per Gallon will be released by Grand Central in early July. The book already features blurbs from people like Alexis Madrigal, editor and lead writer of Wired.com’s “Wired Science” blog, Marcel Pacatte, former Managing Editor of Discover magazine, Peter Senge, bestselling author of The Fifth Discipline, and Stephen Leeb, PhD, author of The Coming Economic Collapse, as well as Game Over. Now we just received the first review of the book from Publisher’s Weekly and it’s a terrific one. PW designates titles of special merit with a “starred review” and that’s what $20 per Gallon received. To provide a little context for that, out of the 33 titles reviewed alongside Chris’, only 3 received starred reviews. The reviewer said of the book:

He reveals the consequences of each incremental hike in gas prices: at $8 per gallon, air travel will essentially vanish; at $14 a gallon, Wal-Mart stores will become empty “ghost boxes”; when gas hits $16 a gallon, sushi will become an extravagance only for the extremely wealthy. While many changes will come at tremendous social and economic cost, Steiner envisions a better future, where human ingenuity will spur greater efficiency and less waste. Although it’s unlikely all the author’s predictions will come true—he goes so far as to forecast the order in which airlines will go out of business—the surprising snapshots of the future (where rising gas prices might revitalize Detroit) make for vivid and compelling reading.

You can read the review in its entirety here. $20 per Gallon appears about two-thirds of the way down the page. Congratulations, Chris!

Congratulations go out to Alexis Madrigal on the sale of his book The History of Our Future: the Untold Story of America’s Forgotten Green Tech Visionaries.  After an exciting, intense auction with four major publishers bidding, the book went to Bob Pigeon over at Da Capo (part of the Perseus Group).

Green tech has become a keystone of President Obama’s plan to remake America, and with even infamous oilmen like T. Boone Pickens spending his own money on television ads to pitch his version of our green tech future, the shift to a country that runs on clean, green energy sounds almost inevitable. But is it?

The History of Our Future will be the first book to tell the incredible, forgotten history of green tech innovation in the United States. Few today realize that electric cabs dominated Manhattan’s streets in the 1890s; that Boise, Idaho had a geothermal heating system in 1910; or that the first megawatt turbine in the world was built back in 1941 by Palmer Putnam, the son of publishing magnate G.P. Putnam, a feat that wouldn’t be duplicated for nearly 40 years; or that the oil embargo in the 1970s that lead to oil and natural gas prices that still haven’t been eclipsed, also lead to an explosion in green technology research that later became derailed when energy prices went down.

In other words: we’ve been here before and each time we’ve had a chance to put our world on a more sustainable path we’ve failed. Now we face a similar situation, when energy prices are low and financial pressure is high. Could the same short-sighted approach that doomed earlier green tech innovation – and which crashed not only Wall Street, but the entire worldwide economy – also bust this latest green tech boom?

Half compendium of lost opportunities, half hopeful look to the future, The History of Our Future will tell the stories of the brilliant, often irascible inventors who foresaw our current problems and tried to invent solutions. These are stories of people taking on larger than life challenges and accomplishing incredible technological feats in the pursuit of wealth and for the thrill of doing something totally, utterly new, but until now they’ve been left out of our shared history.

Alexis Madrigal’s “Wired Science” blog over at Wired.com is the 25th most linked-to blog in the world and the #1 science blog in the world. He has also been recognized by The Aspen Institute for his pioneering use of Twitter, and has been invited to speak at South by Southwest, Stanford Law School, and Berkeley Journalism School. Alexis has also appeared on NPR’s The Takeaway and Bryant Park Project, and has been interviewed by The New York Times Magazine, BBC and Current TV.

Very interesting interview with author Jon Jeter, author of Flat Broke in the Free Market. Here’s a snippet:

Q. You include personal stories in this book, but not your own. Why?
A. The people in this book, I think about them every day. I was privileged that they invited me to their homes, and this is the least of what I owe them, to tell their stories in a fuller, more human way than I could as a reporter. Also they are all a lot more interesting than I am.

Q. Was it sometimes disturbing, returning to your hotel after such encounters?
A. Always. I remember a woman in Mozambique telling me her story, and I guess I had a pained look on my face; it was guilt, empathy. And she said “My child, don’t worry, the worst is over; we’re still here.” I was often overwhelmed by the people’s struggles but energized by their strength and resilience.

Congratulations go out to Chris Guillebeau, who’s now contributing to Anderson Cooper’s AC360.com. You can check out his first piece there by clicking here. Sounds like CNN.com may pick up the piece in a few days, as well. Chris’ goal is to travel to every country in the world by the time he’s 35 and he’s well on his way, having already eclipsed the 100 country mark some time ago. Of course, the further you go the more challenging it gets to reach some of the countries (and the more dangerous), but I don’t think anything will stop Chris at this point and I’m certainly excited to hear about his travels as he goes.

Congratulations go out to Mike Kimel and Michael Kanell on the sale of their book The Facts: How Democratic & Republican Presidents Really Perform on the Issues that Matter Most, to Black Dog & Leventhal.

One of the most vexing things about discussing any aspect of politics is that there’s so much information (and disinformation) out there that it seems almost impossible to pin anything down. Even economists (i.e. people who should theoretically know) often can’t answer the most basic of questions, such as which president produced the most growth (nope, not Reagan - he was 3rd), or which president has been the worst with the national debt. And when you start to look at other issues, such as which presidents had the highest crime and abortion rates, which presidents performed best with the value of the dollar, or with health insurance and home ownership - you can forget about reaching any kind of consensus.

That’s where The Facts comes in. The authors have come up with a terrific concept wherein they look at more than 40 different issues people care about. They go back half a century (beginning with the Eisenhower administration) and use only government sources for the stats they provide. They also provide all their sources and show readers exactly what they’re doing. They even encourage the reader to get involved and look at the numbers for themselves, and once the book is published they’ll even have a website that will serve as a repository for all the information in the book. That way there’s no massaging of the numbers and no political bias whatsoever. Then they rank the presidents and talk about who did well, who did poorly, and why.

A lot of very fascinating things come out in the book. For instance, the presidents who produced the greatest growth (Real GDP per capita) were JFK & LBJ, followed by Clinton and then Reagan (who were just about tied, with Clinton getting the edge) and then Carter (yes, Carter). And overall, when you look back as far as Ike, Democratic presidents have performed much better in producing growth than Republicans, which most people find surprising. There are a lot of other fascinating things as well, such as the Clinton administration actually having one of the lowest abortion rates.

Mike Kimel taught both Economics and Advanced Statistics in the Graziado School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University for five years, ran the internal consulting group and developed competitive strategies for a Fortune 500 telecom company, and worked for a Big 4 accounting firm. His co-author is Michael Kanell, an economics writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Kanell has been a journalist for 25 years and has appeared on CNBC and NPR.

Black Dog & Leventhal has also brought in a fantastic illustrator named Nigel Holmes, who has produced beautiful & informative graphics for clients such as Wired, CNN, Discover, Time magazine, the Atlantic, Details, and dozens of others.