Customer Reviews

A Solar Manifesto

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I'm fully in favour of a solar-driven society, so I had high expectations for A Solar Manifesto. Nothing presages a coming revolution better than a good manifesto. But unfortunately this supposed manifesto is just a badly translated and outdated rant. The solar energy community might well have been better off without it.

To start with, the English prose in this book is often awkward and unconventional. It is apparently a translation from an original German text, but I must say that I have seldom seen such an unprofessional translation in print. Secondly, this is not so much a reasoned argument for solar energy as it is an emotional tirade against contemporary energy policy and against modern society in general. And whatever merits the author may have in other walks of life, a philosopher he is not - his criticism consists of simplifying and repetitive low-brow rhetoric from a very narrow perspective.

Finally, this second edition is supposed to be a "fully updated edition". Well, a few developments after the year 2000 have been added, but the majority of the discussion is still clearly set in the situation of the early 1990s. If you're updating a book, you should actually update the year-by-year statistics given in the tables as well. Including a few recent references might not be a bad idea either.

In conclusion, as disappointing as it is, I can not recommend this book to anyone. For the environmentally minded, there are much, much better books available on the state of our industrial civilization. For the opponent of solar energy, there are not any arguments worth responding to in this book. Even for the proponent of solar energy, I can not find anything in this book that hasn't been presented in a more sensible way elsewhere.

By the time the solar energy revolution comes around, this book will have been deservedly forgotten.