The Scientists, Adventurers, Journeymen, and Mavericks Trying to Save the World
by Porter Fox
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Nov 2021
320 pages
Genre: Travel & Adventure
Publication Information
A gripping blend of narrative travelogue, history, and climatology set against the end of ice, snow, and winter as we know it.
As the planet warms, winter is shrinking. In the last fifty years, the Northern Hemisphere lost a million square miles of spring snowpack and in the US alone, snow cover has been reduced by 15-30%. On average, winter has shrunk by a month in most northern latitudes.
In this deeply researched, beautifully written, and adventure-filled book, journalist Porter Fox travels along the edge of the Northern Hemisphere's snow line to track the scope of this drastic change, and how it will literally change everything—from rapid sea level rise, to fresh water scarcity for two billion people, to massive greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost, and a half dozen climate tipping points that could very well spell the end of our world.
This original research is animated by four harrowing and illuminating journeys—each grounded by interviews with idiosyncratic, charismatic experts in their respective fields and Fox's own narrative of growing up on a remote island in Northern Maine.
Timely, atmospheric, and expertly investigated, The Last Winter will showcase a shocking and unexpected casualty of climate change—that may well set off its own unstoppable warming cycle.
"[An] ominous though beautifully written book...It's the kind of book John McPhee would write if he were abroad in wintry places, and we're fortunate that Fox has taken his place. An essential addition to the library of climate change and one that ought to spur readers to do something about it." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Fox has written an important, much-needed book about the climate crisis that injects a personal element into an abstract-seeming problem. This is popular science at its best." - Library Journal (starred review)
"Fox, editor of the literary journal Nowhere, spotlights a warming world in this moving travelogue about snowy places and the people who inhabit them...Environmentalists will find much to savor in this exciting yet distressing tale." - Publishers Weekly
"As winter vanishes, so do the many cultures forged by glacier, ice floe, and permafrost. Porter Fox has written an imaginative and deeply personal travelogue that reveals how climate change is not only a threat to our future, but a threat to our past." - Nathaniel Rich, author of Losing Earth and Second Nature
"The importance of ice was not as clear to me as it should have been. It is now. This is a rousing, literate, multi-continental tour of the cryosphere. Check it out: the end of winter, if we fail to prevent it, will be the end of the world as we know it." - William Finnegan, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Barbarian Days
"From its gripping opening pages to its haunting conclusion, Porter Fox's The Last Winter is poised to become a landmark text in climate change literature. Yet this isn't a dry, doleful book. Instead, it's filled with often gorgeous prose and fascinating, indelible characters who seem to have gone AWOL from a Paul Theroux or Peter Mathiessen novel. Riveting, unforgettable, and important." - Tom Bissell, author of Chasing the Sea and Apostle
This information about The Last Winter was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Porter Fox was born in New York and raised on the coast of Maine. He is the author of Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border and DEEP: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow, featured on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Review and in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. He lives, writes and edits the award-winning literary travel writing journal Nowhere in upstate New York. His work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Outside, Men's Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Powder, TheNewYorker.com, TheParisReview.com, Salon.com, Narrative, The Literary Review, and has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing. He teaches at Columbia University School of the Arts and is a MacDowell Fellow. He won a Western Press Association award in 2014 for a two-part feature about climate change and a Lowell Thomas Award for an excerpt from Northland.
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