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"  Alan Weisman is a special kind of doomsdayer. He doesn&amp;#039;t wear a sandwich board and scream on the highway, and we&amp;#039;re pretty sure he doesn&amp;#039;t have a musty bunker in his basement. He doesn&amp;#039;t go the Al Gore route and preach about carbon sequestering or other ways to save the planet, either. Instead, in his new book, The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books, $25), he just assumes that we&amp;#039;re probably not going to change our ways, jumps to a time when humans have been wiped out, and imagines what could happen to the world we leave behind. The first thing to go is infrastructure: Buildings crumble, tunnels flood, and nature reclaims its dominance. In some of Weisman&amp;#039;s less depressing scenarios, coyotes and bobcats reclaim a wooded Central Park, and Lexington Avenue turns into a river full of class V rapids. And then there are the more dire possibilities, including a mini chemical winter and enormous vortexes of plastic swirling in the ocean. Kind of makes it sound like a good time to be dead. But it also gets the point across. Weisman creates a world that&amp;#039;s both haunting and captivating. And if it doesn&amp;#039;t make you want to rush out and buy a Prius, at least you might not look down so much on those who do. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/reviews/a3347/bookreview090507/>