GROWING AMERICA: The Story of a Grassroots Activist

"Think globally, act locally" is the familiar, functional refrain of this earnest book, as exemplified by the author's life. Kidd, "The Tree Man," established a volunteer free-tree program that saw several million trees planted in a decade in the counties around his hometown of Canton, Ohio. The story of how he conceived, organized and accomplished his 1989 dream of reseeding thousands of parcels of mostly barren open land, from tiny backyards to acres of fallow fields, is inspirational: in the sections where he discusses his program, Kidd is as fervent about the nuts-and-bolts of wooing Rotary Club funding and finding sources for inexpensive seedlings as he is about grander themes of ecological degradation and a planet in peril. When his focus shifts away from "Re-growing America," however, the author often has too much to say about too little. While he offers unsentimental chapters on his experience serving in the Vietnam war, his tenor changes as he espouses the benefits of TM, or transcendental meditation, which he teaches, and offers a preachy, if amusing, explanation of his adventures with vegetarianism. Overall, this is a somewhat clunky hybrid—half an uncomplicated, scattered memoir of a progressive everyman, half a practical handbook of organizing principles for a new generation of grassroots activists. The former, at best well meaning, is of intermittent interest; the latter, disciplined and detailed, is a call for citizen commitment to good causes. (July)