"Our Choice" didn't reach us in time for a full book review, but I nonetheless want to encourage our readers to have a look.

I expected to read either more of the gloom of "An Inconvenient Truth" or an impassioned plea to save the planet while glossing over the challenges still hindering the obvious solutions.

What I discovered instead is an objective and fact-filled book, well written and beautifully designed.

Its pages provide excellent background on renewable energy, efficiency, green buildings, urban sustainability and other answers to the climate change problem. "Our Choice" would make a great foundation for further study more specific to a field or industry.

The book also would be an outstanding high school or college textbook on the subject -- and, in fact, there is a young reader's version of the book available.

Gore occasionally steps out of the generally objective and rational tone of the book to make some critical points in the Introduction and concluding chapter.

In the Introduction he calls out the media for disrespecting the boundary between fact and disinformation.

The ethical mission of media, he says, "has been subjugated by electronic images that carelessly blend news with entertainment, advocacy with advertisements, and the public interest with self-interest."

He quotes Senator Pat Moynihan's line, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts."

In the concluding chapter he offers two versions of a letter from our generation to the next.

One letter explains what we did right and why it worked to avert a climate-change disaster.

The other attempts to explain why we did not act, in the face of undeniable evidence that we must.