Our Non-Fiction Book of the Month for September 2019
It is worse,much worse,than you think.
The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale,perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all,and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise,you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible,even within the lifetime of a teenager today.
Over the past decades,the term "Anthropocene" has climbed into the popular imagination - a name given to the geologic era we live in now,one defined by human intervention in the life of the planet. But however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have ravaged the natural world,which we surely have,it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it,engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries,perhaps until it destroys us.
In the meantime,it will remake us,transforming every aspect of the way we live-the planet no longer nurturing a dream of abundance,but a living nightmare.
Publisher: Penguin Books LtdISBN: 9780141988870Number of pages: 336Weight: 247 gDimensions: 198 x 129 x 19 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'The book is extremely effective in shaking the reader out of that complacency... The margins of my review copy of the book are scrawled with expressions of terror and despair,declining in articulacy as the pages proceed,until it's all just cartoon sad faces and swear words.'- The Guardian
'There is much to learn from this book... If you've snoozed through or turned away from the climate change news,this book will waken and update you.'- The Observer
'A hell of a book.'- The Guardian
'Most of us known the gist,if not the details,of the climate change crisis. And yet it is almost impossible to sustain strong feelings about it. David Wallace-Wells has now provided the details,and with writing that is not only clear and forceful,but often imaginative and even funny,he has found a way to make the information deeply felt. This is a profound book,which simultaneously makes me terrified and hopeful about the future,full of regret and new will.'- Jonathan Safran Foer
'The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet,with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending armageddon.'- Andrew Solomon
'Wallace-Wells research is extensive and solid,his vision compelling and eminently defensible.'- The Daily Telegraph
'If we don't want our grandchildren to curse us,we had better read this book.'- Timothy Snyder,author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twenty-first Century
'David Wallace-Wells argues that the impacts of climate change will much graver than most people realize,and he's right. The Uninhabitable Earth is a timely and provocative work.'- Elizabeth Kolbert,author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
'Trigger warning: when scientists conclude that yesterday's worst-case scenario for global warming is probably unwarranted optimism,it's time to ask Scotty to beam you up. At least that was my reaction upon finishing Wallace-Wells'brilliant and unsparing analysis of a nightmare that is no longer a distant future but our chaotic,burning present.'- Mike Davis
'A lucid and thorough description of our unprecedented crisis,and of the mechanisms of denial with which we seek to avoid its fullest recognition.'- William Gibson
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