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Dispatches from a Changing World
A landmark collection of Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert's most important pieces about climate change and the natural world.
"To be a well-informed citizen of Planet Earth," Rolling Stone has advised, "you need to read Elizabeth Kolbert." From her National Magazine Award-winning series The Climate of Man to her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert's work has shaped the way we think about the environment in the twenty-first century. Collected in Life on a Little-Known Planet are her most influential and thought-provoking essays.
An intrepid reporter and a skillful translator of scientific idees, Kolbert expertly captures the wonders of nature and paints vivid portraits of the researchers and concerned citizens working to preserve them. She takes readers all around the globe, from an island in Denmark that's succeeded in going carbon neutral, to a community in Florida that voted to give rights to waterways, to the Greenland ice sheet, which is melting in a way that has implications for everyone. We meet a biologist who believes we can talk to whales, an entomologist racing to find rare caterpillars before they disappear, and a climatologist who's considered the "father of global warming," amongst other scientists at the forefront of environmental protection.
The threats to our planet that Kolbert has devoted so much of her career to exposing have only grown more serious. Now is the time to deepen our understanding of the world we are in danger of losing.
"Kolbert gracefully balances a realistic awareness of losses brought about by human activity—particularly by the use of fossil fuels—with a sense of wonder at just how much there is still to learn about this 'little-known planet' and admiration for those who quixotically explore and attempt to heal it... . [D]espair and hope dance together [in these] thought-provoking speculations about a world on the edge of violent change." —Kirkus Review (starred review)
This information about Life on a Little-Known Planet 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.
Photo: © John Kleiner
Elizabeth Kolbert is the bestselling author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, and Under a White Sky, which was named a top ten book of the year by The Washington Post. For her work at The New Yorker, where she's a staff writer, she has received two National Magazine Awards and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.
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