For my money, there’s nothing more delicious than a book that lays bare the rot of a corrupted industry from an insider’s perspective. In the hands of a skilled observer, the subject can spring to life. Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’s hilariously disturbing account of Wall Street’s investment-banking industry in the late 1980s, comes to mind.

Lewis’s book traces its lineage to Mark Singer’s Funny Money, a masterpiece of nonfiction that exposed the double-dealing and corruption that led to the collapse of the savings and loan industry. Singer’s impeccable reporting and lively writing carries the reader to the little Oklahoma bank at the epicenter of the financial catastrophe and plops him down right in the middle of the boardroom.

So, it was with a certain amount of anticipation that I picked up Christine MacDonald’s book Green, Inc. (Lyons Press, $24.95) a self-described insider’s tale of how the environmental movement has been hijacked by self-serving leaders and corporate stooges. The book’s press release promised to reveal chapter and verse of mismanagement, malfeasance, and “double lives.” An ambitious goal, no doubt, and I couldn’t wait to tear into it.

The author immediately sets her sights on the Big Three of the conservation movement: Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. arm of the World Wildlife Fund — though she doesn’t pass up the opportunity to slam the Environmental Defense Fund and its leader, Fred Krupp, along with countless, but unidentified, environmental websites (what she quaintly calls ejournals), and other various and sundry enablers…

Full Story: http://www.grist.org/feature/2008/10/03/green.inc/?source=daily