The film is a mix of Gore’s own private life and what led him to give presentations worldwide about global warming and its effects. Gore offers an eye-opening case full of facts and easy-to-follow scientific data that show major climate changes are in store for this planet if people don’t act quickly. Scientists across the globe are no longer dismissing the fact that carbon emissions trapped in the atmosphere are also trapping more of the sun’s heat and altering the world’s climate. Polar ice is melting at an alarming rate. Massive glaciers are shrinking. Glacier National Park will soon have to be renamed. The famous snows atop Mt. Kilimanjaro will soon be gone. And the melting ice flowing into the world’s oceans has altered sea temperatures, causing more powerful hurricanes as witnessed by last year’s unprecedented number of Atlantic hurricanes and Pacific typhoons. But all is not lost. “An Inconvenient Truth” offers lots of solutions to help reduce carbon emissions — everything from recycling to improving fuel efficiency in cars to energy conservation. If we all worked a little harder to reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere, there’s a better hope for the future health of this planet and the next generations that will live here.

Keep and Give Away, by Susan Meyers

In an age when too much poetry, like politics, retreats to opposite ends of the spectrum — either aloof and narcissistic or dumbed down as clichés for the soundbyte-loving masses — how lucky we are to have poems as spare, honest and accessible as those from Susan Meyers. Ever since I picked up her 2006 collection (a winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize), it has been at my bedside or among my favorite books to read this summer. Meyers writes of childhood memories at the playground, tender moments with her mother before and after her death, and the days when she struggles to “keep and give away” the fruits of her experiences. Like the shells she collects in one poem or the ibis she spies from a boat in another, these gifts of startling beauty haunt us and remind us of our vulnerability, our courage to plod on, and the grace we are given to endure.

Moleskin notebooks

They were the favorite notebook brand for Picasso, Hemingway and van Gogh. Now the Moleskine has become my most treasured portable writing companion to jot down notes, quotes, character names, poems, ideas and observations. I once spurned such fine leatherbound journals, thinking they were too perfect for my rough draft thoughts. Instead used lined pages of spiral bound journals. But after receiving a free Moleskin at an arts conference last fall, the blank page has never looked so inviting. Moleskins, which originally came from French bookbinders and sold in Parisian shops, are now available at most local bookstores and stationery shops. The journals come in various sizes. I like the large black book size with 80 pages, a collapsible folder inside the back cover, and a ribbon that wraps around the right side of the cover and pages. Get one. Write now!

— By Michael Beadle