"Power to Save the World"

This is a dandy new book from Gwyneth Cravens, who grew up in Albuquerque in the 1950s and had a parent (her dad), the parents of friends, and, later, her own friends employed in the nuclear complex.

In one of those "small world of New Mexico" connections, nuclear convert Stewart Brand provides a positive back-cover blurb that is repeated on Cravens' Web site, www.cravenspowertosavetheworld.com. Brand's earlier fame came as founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue. Brand's New Mexico's connections go back nearly 40 years and include acquaintance with Albuquerque solar luminaries and founders of the Lama Foundation near San Cristobal. More recently, Brand has been a board member of the Santa Fe Institute. Cravens' site has Brand's report of a seminar she did for the Long Now Foundation (www.longnow.org), where Brand is co-chair of the board. Long Now's other co-chair is Danny Hillis, a member of the science board of Santa Fe Institute. Just one of the stops along the amazing career of Hillis, who is a mere 51-years-old, was co-founding Thinking Machines Corp. a leading innovator in massive parallel computers.