Just read half of the book in the library, jumping away from several chapters which we're all aware of already. A few quick thoughts.
Firstly, it's why Tikopia survived. In parallel to Montequest's message on teamspeak + forum on a consensus for ZPG, this island community already gets it. Active abortion / pregnancy prevention methods (fav rave : "Coitus Interruptus") + active killing of babies when born. Volunteer-based suicide, or allowing mass virtual suicide when one clan choose to die rather than be murdered by another clan. I've gotta spend some time digesting this in my quest to answer my own question : "Who and how do we choose the 9 out of 10 that need to be pushed out of a sinking boat?"
The second thing that irked me is this : all this materials on his book, with obvious signs of overshoot in population and resource depletion, and he calls himself an optimist?
Interestingly Richard Heinberg's summary of the book is quite accurate. I like also the fact on amazon that those who bought this book or tainter's book also had the following bought :
Customers who bought this book also bought
* Powerdown : Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World by Richard Heinberg
* The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies by Richard Heinberg
* Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict With a New Introduction by the Author by Michael T. Klare
* Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change by William Catton
* Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
* The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century by James Howard Kunstler
A must read for those who really want a waking-up picture of what we're facing right now.