The Fragile Earth
Writing from the New Yorker on Climate Change
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- $ 57.900,00
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- $ 57.900,00
Descripción editorial
A classic collection of the New Yorker’s most urgent and groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of the climate emergency
In 1989, just one year after climatologist James Hansen first came before a Senate committee and testified that the earth was now warmer than it had ever been in recorded history, thanks to humankind’s heedless consumption of fossil fuels, New Yorker writer Bill McKibben published a deeply reported and considered piece on climate change and what it could mean for the planet.
At the time, the piece was to some speculative to the point of alarmist; read now, McKibben’s work is heroically prescient. Since then, the New Yorker has devoted enormous attention to climate change, describing the causes of the crisis, the political and ecological conditions we now find ourselves in, and the scenarios and solutions we face.
The Fragile Earth tells the story of climate change – its past, present, and future – taking readers from Greenland to the Great Plains, and into both laboratories and rain forests. It features some of the best writing on global warming from the last three decades, including Bill McKibben’s seminal essay ‘The End of Nature,’ the first piece to popularize both the science and politics of climate change for a general audience, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Elizabeth Kolbert, as well as Kathryn Schulz, Dexter Filkins, Jonathan Franzen, Ian Frazier, Eric Klinenberg, and others. The result, in its range, depth, and passion, promises to bring light, and sometimes heat, to the great emergency of our age.
Reviews
‘Immersive and engaging . . . Reading three decades of essays on this important and urgent topic, one is appalled that we know so much and have repeatedly done so little with that knowledge, as well as simultaneously hopeful and skeptical that technological solutions can save us now’ Library Journal
‘Illuminating and powerful . . . A memorable book with a resounding message’ Publishers Weekly (starred review)
About the author
David Remnick has been the editor of the New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. His books include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, King of the World: Muhammed Ali and the Rise of an American Hero, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, and two collections of his magazine pieces.
Henry Finder has been the editorial director of the New Yorker since 1997. Formerly the executive editor of the quarterly Transition, he has edited several anthologies drawn from the New Yorker’s archives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This illuminating and powerful collection is filled with pieces on climate change originally published in the New Yorker. The selections are bookended by entries by science writers Bill McKibben whose 1989 "The End of Nature" was, the editors note, "the first extensive exploration of climate change" for the general public and Elizabeth Kolbert, with her disillusioned "Afterword." In between, the collection includes work by essayists (Ian Frazier), novelists (Jonathan Franzen), foreign correspondents (David Filkins), and sociologists (Eric Klinenberg). It covers shrinking glaciers in the Indian Himalayas; how the acidification of the world's oceans threatens marine life; and the unprecedented scale of wildfires in Australia, California, and the Great Plains. Other essays describe how life is changing for whale hunters in Point Hope, Alaska, one of North America's oldest continuously settled communities; reforestation efforts in sub-Saharan Africa; a company's efforts to wean America off meat with plant-based burgers; and scientists who explore drastic geoengineering technologies. Permeated by a sense of urgency McKibben comments in a more recent piece that "what has defied expectations is the slowness of the response" this is a memorable book with a resounding message.
