Christine Feldthaus is a well-known TV personality in Denmark. She has participated in several different types of shows, mostly focused on life style. She is probably most known for being in a show called Kender du typen? where two so-called experts on life style and consumer behaviors try to guess which celebrity whose home they are visiting and while doing so, talking about what the things in the home tell about their owner. She was very popular in this show, coming across as very funny and direct.
Because of her personality and popularity, she was approached by a publisher who wanted her to write about her own personal journey with living more green, reducing her carbon footprint, her use of water and electricity and more. Feldthaus saw this as a challenge and the book is written as a diary where we follow her slowly learning more and more about living green.The diary runs from December 2007 to June 2008 and details how she, her husband and teenage son gradually changed their habits and ways of consuming and focusing on sustainability.
She talks about isolating her house better, cutting down on electricity, all the bad things you find in nail polish and lip stick and how to make a green lifestyle make sense while at the same time wanting to live a life with luxury. So over these 6 months, she changes her life in a lot of ways – but none of these are huge life-altering decisions. It’s the little things that count. Like turning off the light when you’re not in the room. Not leaving all your electric things on – or even on standby. Taking shorter showers. Buying more ecological. Taking the train or the bike and not the car. Little things – without being truly fanatic. And it works.
After 6 months, she has saving quite a bit of money by not using as much heat and electricity. She has lost weight because she’s taking the bike more instead of taking the car. They eat healthier, having two days a week without meat. And they have cut their C02 emission by a lot.
So it works. There’s no question about it that what she has done, has been effective. I believe that it’s a very good thing to use less electricity and heat and cut down on CO2 emissions. And this book gives suggestions about how you do so. There’s no doubt that writing the book has changed Christine Feldthaus and changed the way, she and her family live their lives.
However, the book itself – not that amazing. Not only would I have liked it to be more informative, I would have liked it to be more funny. Christine Feldthaus is known for her humor and for being so direct – but maybe it works best on TV, being brief and transient and being said while you watch the sparkle in her eyes and see her smile. It doesn’t work as well in this book. In the end, you are left with the feeling of having read a rather blah book, a bit too long even for the amount of information in it and not as funny as you would have hoped.
- Title: Feldthaus skruer ned
- Author: Christine Feldthaus
- Publisher: Thaning & Appel
- Year: 2008
- Pages: 254 pages
- Source: Own Collection
- Stars: 3 stars out of 5
The Literary Bunny 