Rodale and Al Gore Team Up for New Book in Spring ’08

By Dermot McEvoy -- Publishers Weekly, 9/6/2007 10:29:00 AM

Rodale Books is publishing a follow-up to Vice President Al Gore’s bestseller An Inconvenient Truth. Titled The Path to Survival, Rodale plans a 500,000 copy first printing, a substantial increase on the 85,000 copy first printing of An Inconvenient Truth. .

Like An Inconvenient Truth, The Path to Survival will be a paperback original. "We chose to go once again with the winning formula we used for An Inconvenient Truth, publishing it in original trade paperback so that it will be more accessible to the largest possible numbers of readers, " Leigh Haber, Rodale v-p/editorial director, told PW. "And in putting that book together we decided to go with the paperback format because it would be more accessible to the numbers of people who would be able to buy the books in both terms of numbers and age."

Rodale seems to have found an appropriate—albeit obvious—pub date: Earth Day 2008. "It’s a great opportunity to help people focus on this urgent problem," said Haber, "and it’s something that media and bookstores participate in--it’s the perfect launching pad."

The book will not be embargoed and galleys will be available to the media. Promotion and publicity "will be massive," according to Haber. "We will be touring Al nationwide and he will be doing bookstore and media events across the country and no doubt around the world."

Haber hopes that The Path to Survival picks up where An Inconvenient Truth left off. "After viewing and reading An Inconvenient Truth," Haber said, "many readers and viewers were left with the sense that they now understood the extent of the climate crisis but didn’t know what to do about it. This book will contain both solutions to the crisis and will be an exploration from a philosophical point of view of how we can differently view and inhabit out planet so that we understand the extent of the crisis. And to Al the magnitude of the crisis is 'will our planet continue to be habitable or not?' He looking at solutions to the climate crisis from both a philosophical and scientific point of view."