Book cover: "Moment in the Sun"

• Title: Moment in the Sun
• Cover subtitle: A Dial Report on the Deteriorating Quality of the American Environment
• Authors: Robert Rienow (1909-1989) & Leona Train Rienow (1903-1983)
• Excerpts from "About the Authors": "Robert Rienow, Ph.D., Litt.D., is professor of Political Science at the Graduate School of Public Affairs, State University of New York at Albany. ... Through long association with conservation movements he has brought an ecological orientation to his writing and teaching in the fields of government and public affairs. ... Leona Train Rienow, his wife, has collaborated with him on several books and is an author in her own right. The Rienows live in a remodeled 200-year-old colonial farmhouse near Selkirk, N.Y., which they bought in 1941. When they took over the 138-acre farm it had been exploited almost beyond repair. Since then the Rienows' conscientious reclamation program has restored the land and renewed its wildlife so that the farm is today an ecological showplace."
• Publisher: The Dial Press,  New York
• Year: 1967 (This edition is the 1970 third printing)
• Dust jacket design: La Liberté
• Book design: Slavomir Dratewka
• Pages: 286 (which includes about 60 pages of sources and additional notes)
• Format: Hardcover
• Price: $6.00
• Dust jacket excerpt: "The quality of the American environment is sharply on the downgrade. Day by day and step by step 'America, the beautiful' is becoming something of the past, something to be remembered with nostalgia as part of 'the good old days.' Here is an item-by-item presentation of the ways in which we have ignored ecological principles and abused our environment under the pressures of a burgeoning population and an outmoded frontier creed of exploitation."
• Provenance: This book was formerly part of the Northland Pioneer College Library in Navajo County, Arizona.
• First sentence: Every 7½ seconds a new American is born.
• Last sentence: The sacrifice must now be made, if not of much personal effort and much public money, then surely of more precious things even than these.
• Random excerpt from middle #1: In the society in which man is submerged in the mob his political ends are defined for him and his approval manipulated. There is no opportunity for creative or individual solutions because the channels of communication are clogged.
• Random excerpt from middle #2: But man added new complications for the majestic saguaro. Man hates the coyote, whose regular food consists of desert rodents, notably the ground squirrel, wood rat, and rabbit. The ground squirrel and wood rat feed on the saguaro as much for water as for food. Since, however, it became official government policy to exterminate the coyote by all means ... the rodent population has multiplied astronomically. There are now fears that the Saguaro National Monument may not survive. We will have exchanged an eternal wonder for a beefsteak.
• Excerpt from Amazon review: In 2013, Jenny Hanniver wrote: "Yes, I'd read SILENT SPRING and Fairfield Osborn's OUR PLUNDERED PLANET, but it was the Rienow book, MOMENT IN THE SUN, that inspired my husband and me to get off our fannies, study ecology, and become seriously committed environmental activists as a married team, like the Rienows. ... Was this book important to me? You bet it was! It changed my life for the better, and at 77, I'm still involved! We now know just how fragile our entire world habitat is, and that it may be toxic to my grandchildren."