Written by Lydia Millet in 2020, A Children’s Bible is a dystopic novel about climate change and generational divide that imagines an ominous near-future beset with turbulent weather, crumbling infrastructures, and interfamily strife. Set in a modern-day world, Millet’s story blends vivid descriptions of realistic teenage slang and salty humor with broader religious allegory and incorporates traces of magic realism to craft an impassioned ode to science. Biblical analogies are frequently employed to portray the... Read A Children's Bible Summary

A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes is a nonfiction book published in 2020 by the American author Eric Jay Dolin. It combines meteorological, cultural, and social history to offer a perspective on the hurricanes that are a recurrent part of the American experience. Born in 1961, Dolin has a background in biological and environmental science, and from the time of his childhood ventures on the beaches of Connecticut and Long Island, he... Read A Furious Sky Summary

Part memoir and part call to action, renowned naturalist David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future invites readers to consider the state of the Earth today. Attenborough provides an account of his own life as a naturalist, his fears for the future, and his recommendations for how to make possible a better future for the planet and its inhabitants. He recounts evolving attitudes about humanity’s role... Read A Life on Our Planet Summary

All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis (2020) is a collection of essays and poems edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson. Johnson, a marine biologist and policy expert is the co-founder of a nonprofit called Urban Ocean Lab, co-founder of a climate initiative called The All We Can Save Project, and a co-creator of the podcast How to Save a Planet. Wilkinson is an author, teacher, and... Read All We Can Save Summary

An Inconvenient Truth is a 2006 nonfiction book released in conjunction with the documentary film of the same name. This book, by former vice-president Al Gore, presents scientific information about global climate change. He intersperses this information with personal anecdotes that outline the more human and social dimensions of the issue.An Inconvenient Truth begins with an introduction to the basic science of global warming and the greenhouse gases that cause it. The first forty pages... Read An Inconvenient Truth Summary

Bewilderment is a 2021 novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers (The Echo Maker, The Overstory). Set in the near future amid a collapsing environment, the story follows a single parent named Theo Byrne and his son Robin, who is neurodivergent. The novel has been shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.Plot SummaryTheo Byrne is an astrobiologist who specializes in the search for extraterrestrial life. His wife, Alyssa, died two years ago, and now he must... Read Bewilderment Summary

American poet Dorianne Laux published “Break” in her debut collection of poetry, Awake (1990). “Break” provides a brief yet intimate look into Laux’s family life, in which she compares the construction of domesticity to that of a puzzle. “Break” is written as a singular, 20-line stanza, juxtaposing simple language against the poem’s more complex thematic content.Laux’s influences range from Pablo Neruda to Adrienne Rich. Her poetry is distinctly feminist: confessional like that of Anne Sexton... Read Break Summary

Published in 2018, Brief Answers to the Big Questions is a popular science book that explains what scientists have learned about the birth and history of the universe and the future of human technological civilization. As the final published writing by physicist Stephen Hawking, the work became a bestseller and landed on several best-book lists. Hawking, author of the best-selling work A Brief History of Time, was a chief contributor to many of the discoveries... Read Brief Answers to the Big Questions Summary

Originally published in 1986, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner illustrates how precarious the American West’s water supply is. This reality was something few people, including Westerners, realized at the time. The book was listed as one of the Modern Library’s 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th century and was nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award. It was also made into a PBS documentary. There is... Read Cadillac Desert Summary

In the 2013 nonfiction book, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, British political theorist Timothy Mitchell upends the traditional view on the relationship between carbon-based energy (primarily coal and oil) and democracy. Mitchell takes issue with previous accounts because they typically gloss over how workers, oil companies, imperial powers, the public, and carbon-energy producing countries create political relations out of the flows of and demand for energy. As a political scientist and... Read Carbon Democracy Summary

Following his best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), geologist and anthropologist Jared Diamond published a companion book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, in 2006. Where Guns, Germs, and Steel described how various environments around the world helped or hindered human civilization, Collapse explains how environmental abuse ruined many past societies and how it threatens civilizations today. An updated edition, released in 2011 by Penguin Books, is the subject of this... Read Collapse Summary

Dark Life (2010) is a dystopian young adult novel by American author Kat Falls. The novel is the first of a two-part series, followed by Rip Tide. Dark Life is set in post-apocalyptic East-Coast America, now ruled by a government called the Commonwealth. Water covers most of the planet’s surface in the wake of climate change and a select group of pioneers now live under the sea. Teenage protagonist Ty Townson uncovers a wide-reaching government... Read Dark Life Summary

Enlightenment Now is a 2018 nonfiction book by Canadian anthropologist and linguist Steven Pinker. Pinker holds that Enlightenment-era values—namely reason, humanism, and science—are underappreciated and that those who believe in a free, liberal society should defend them. He argues persuasively that the pessimism prevalent in modern society and political discourse is largely unfounded—and that this cynicism results from ignorance of the impressive progress in human rights, safety, health, governance, and technology of the last several... Read Enlightenment Now Summary

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures was written in 2020 by mycologist Merlin Sheldrake, a PhD graduate from the University of Cambridge and a former research fellow for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, whose academic research is primarily focused on fungal biology and Amazonian ethnobotany. Entangled Life is Sheldrake’s first book and reflects his lifelong fascination with the complex world of the fungi kingdom.The book... Read Entangled Life Summary

In 2006, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New York Times journalist Elizabeth Kolbert published Field Notes from a Catastrophe, an urgent review of climate change. The book began as a tripartite publication in the New Yorker, for which the political journalist received a National Magazine Award.Kolbert’s investigation begins on Greenland’s west coast, where natives have noticed the shrinking of icebergs for years. In another northerly location, the Alaskan island of Shishmaref is disappearing underwater... Read Field Notes from a Catastrophe Summary

Since its first publication in December 1920 in Harper’s Magazine and in 1923 in Frost’s prize-winning collection New Hampshire, Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” has opened many conversations about the apocalypse. The poem’s bleak apocalyptic themes also blend with philosophies about human beings’ infallible talent for self-destruction. The poem likens the elemental force of fire with desire and the force of ice with hate. Scholars cite the poem’s inspiration as Canto 32 of Dante’s Inferno... Read Fire and Ice Summary

In the 2023 nonfiction book Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World, John Vaillant, a prominent science and nature journalist, examines the catastrophic 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. This nonfiction work, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, explores why climate change has disastrous effects on wildfires, turning them from a danger into a deadly threat to human existence. Climate change is exacerbated by carbon dioxide emissions from human petroleum use, and the demand... Read Fire Weather Summary

Barbara Kingsolver’s 2012 novel Flight Behavior presents a symbolic connection between Dellarobia Turnbow, an unhappy farm wife who secretly dreams of running away from it all, and a surprising migration of monarch butterflies that alight upon her in-laws’ property in Feathertown, Tennessee. As the butterflies struggle to survive and reproduce to continue their species, Dellarobia struggles in her efforts to deal with the consequences of her past decisions and the possibility of her new life... Read Flight Behavior Summary

Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash is a 2012 non-fiction book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes. Garbology is an analysis of American consumption, trash production, and what happens to everything in our disposable economy after we discard it. Through statistical analysis, interviews, and personal stories, Humes tells the story of our largest export—our trash—and how trash came to be synonymous with American life.Humes divides Garbology into three sections: first, an analysis of our... Read Garbology Summary

Written by Amitav Ghosh in 2019, Gun Island focuses on the adventures of narrator Deen Dutta, an Indian rare books dealer living and working in America, as his fascination with the Bengali folk legend of the Gun Merchant unexpectedly connects him to a varied cast of people, cultures, and countries. Gun Island contains many elements of magical realism. The book also explores a variety of themes, including The Conflict Between Humans and Nature and The... Read Gun Island Summary