FICTION

ENERGY UNBOUND: A FABLE FOR AMERICA’S FUTURE by Hunter Lovins, Amory Lovins and Seth Zuckerman (Sierra Club: $17.95). Eunice Bunnyhut, a Dubuque homemaker for 24 years, answers a blind want ad and winds up as U.S. secretary of Energy. The President, it seems, was frustrated with energy policies that didn’t work and wanted a layperson to bring some common sense to the snarl of conflicting policies and priorities.

After her first day in Washington, Eunice says to her husband with a sigh, “Joe, I have a feeling we’re not in Iowa anymore.”

So much for the dramatic highlights. But the reader is forewarned by the word “fable” in the subtitle. “Energy Unbound” will not set the literary world aflame, nor was it meant to. The middle 300 pages consist of history’s longest coffee break during which bureaucrat Duncan Jefferson Holt painstakingly briefs Eunice on alternative energy sources and how, with practical applications, they can be employed to substantially eliminate the nation’s reliance on oil, coal and nuclear fuels.

The Lovins and Seth Zuckerman are perhaps the leading experts on the subject. While it all seems quite fanciful at first, the authors make a convincing argument in relatively entertaining style, considering the ponderous nature of most energy books. It should, in fact, be mandatory reading in the U.S. Department of Energy.