News & Updates

Video intro for The Ripple Effect

I have just added my video introduction to the media and downloads page. You can also see it here.

Associated Press Review

The Ripple Effect offers a balanced and insightful assessment of what could emerge as the dominant issue in decades ahead. Anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the threat to what the author calls “the most valuable resource on earth” would do well to heed his message. Read the full review here >

Julia Child: Links

I’ve just added a page of links to the Julia Child section of the website that could be useful to students, researchers and readers of my book, My Life In France. There are also a couple of video clips.

Publishers Weekly starred review

Prud’homme, a journalist and the coauthor with Julia Child of My Life in France, examines crucial issues concerning the world’s finite supply of fresh water– pollution, water quantity (drought and flood), waste, and governance. Focusing on the U.S., he explores how water scarcity, population growth, and environmental degradation are forcing the country to a moment of reckoning on a scale not seen since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972. And he notes how woefully obsolete laws designed to protect drinking supplies in the 1970s are becoming, when hundreds of untested new chemicals enter U.S. waterways every year, and the majority of water pollution now comes…

Booklist review

The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century. Prud’homme, Alex (Author) Jun 2011. 448 p. Scribner, hardcover, $27.00. (9781416535454). 333.91. As development spreads and water resources are stretched to the limit, one essential resource, water, is becoming increasingly commodified and the subject of corporate interest and investment as well as lawsuits when consumers weigh in with their concerns. How did we get to such a place, and what does the future hold for water quality and supply in the U.S. and around the world? Prud’homme examines the everyday products whose use affects the quality and the supply of water, including…

Kirkus review

The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century Freelance journalist Prud’homme (The Cell Game: Sam Waksal’s Fast Money and False Promises—and the Fate of ImClone’s Cancer Drug, 2004, etc.) offers a comprehensive, even encyclopedic, survey of the dangers, debates, frustrations, failures, technology, greed, apathy and rage that whirlpool around the phenomenally complex issue of freshwater. The author conducted interviews with principals on all sides of the issue—consumers, entrepreneurs, politicians, business executives, bureaucrats, the rich and the thirsty—and visited key sites, and he provides a generally balanced view of the looming freshwater crisis. He educates us about…

Simple steps save water

Here is a selection of simple tips taken from The Ripple Effect that show just how easy it can be to reduce the amount of water you use. You can read the full 10 over in the Ripple Effect section. Fix leaks: a dripping faucet can waste more than 10 gallons of water a day Replace old wasteful toilets, showerheads, and washers with efficient new ones Recycle leftover water from your drinking glass or canteen by pouring it on plants Be careful what you pour down the drain or toilet, and don’t use anti-bacterial soap Avoid spraying the herbicide Atrazine…

An Oil Spill Grows in Brooklyn

WITH an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil spilling from the Deepwater Horizon site every day — for a total of some 3.3 million gallons, so far — the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may eventually prove to be the largest oil spill in American history. But New Yorkers forget, or don’t know, that a much larger oil spill sits in our own backyard: an estimated 17 million to 30 million gallons of oil, benzene, naptha and other carcinogenic chemicals pollute Newtown Creek and a 55-acre, 25-foot-deep swath of soil in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. People don’t often think of urban creeks…

There Will Be Floods

LAST month, a 30-foot section of levee ruptured in Fernley, Nev. While the cause of the breach, which swamped 450 homes and forced dozens of people to evacuate, is unknown, anyone familiar with the drowning of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina will tell you this: Levees fail. Indeed, there are more than 100 antiquated earthen berms across the country in danger of collapsing. What happened in Nevada is a harbinger of a much larger problem nationwide. In Texas City, Tex., for instance, levees protect 50,000 residents and $6 billion worth of property, including almost 5 percent of the nation’s oil-refining…

Writing Pulia

“THOSE YEARS IN FRANCE were the best time of my life. It was the time when I discovered who I was and what I was about. It was so exciting that I hardly stopped to catch my breath!” So Julia recalled in December 2003, when she was ninety­-one and living in a retirement community in Montecito, California. I was Paul Child’s grandnephew. a young writer who had long wanted to collaborate with her on a book. But Julia was self-protective and for years had politely resisted the idea-until now, when she suddenly said something like, “Maybe we should try working on the France book together.”…