While our earth shows no sign of slowing down, keep on top of it with these nonfiction picks that are perfect for a book club discussion.
What a time to be alive. With innovations in science and twists and turns in the social world around us coming our way at warp speed, it’s a full time job to keep up on all of it. Thankfully, as usual, we’ve got some of our lifetime’s fabulous documentarians, journalists, scientists, and big thinkers to parse it all and present it to us in a way that is enriching, effective, and entertaining. From a new spin on climate prognoses, to a big tech tell-all, to a perspective on how to live generously, here are the year’s best books that cover our world and beyond.
What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures
by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "With a thoughtfully curated series of essays, poetry, and conversations, the brilliant scientist and climate expert Ayana Elizabeth Johnson has assembled a group of dynamic people who are willing to imagine what seems impossible, and articulate those visions with enthusiastic clarity." –Roxane Gay
Our climate future is not yet written. What if we act as if we love the future?
Sometimes the bravest thing we can do while facing an existential crisis is imagine life on the other side. This provocative and joyous book maps an inspiring landscape of possible climate futures.
Through clear-eyed essays and vibrant conversations, infused with data, poetry, and art, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson guides us through solutions and possibilities at the nexus of science, policy, culture, and justice. Visionary farmers and financiers, architects and advocates, help us conjure a flourishing future, one worth the effort it will take – from every one of us, with whatever we have to offer – to create.
If you haven't yet been able to picture a transformed and replenished world – or to see yourself, your loved ones, and your community in it – this book is for you. If you haven't yet found your role in shaping this new world or you're not sure how we can actually get there, this book is for you.
With grace, humor, and humanity, Johnson invites readers to ask and answer this ultimate question together: What if we get it right?
Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet
by Hannah Ritchie
This "eye-opening and essential" book (Bill Gates) will transform how you see our biggest environmental problems – and explains how we can solve them.
It's become common to tell kids that they're going to die from climate change. We are constantly bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won't be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, and that we should reconsider having children.
But in this bold, radically hopeful book, data scientist Hannah Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. In fact, the data shows we've made so much progress on these problems that we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in human history.
Packed with the latest research, practical guidance, and enlightening graphics, this book will make you rethink almost everything you've been told about the environment. Not the End of the World will give you the tools to understand our current crisis and make lifestyle changes that actually have an impact. Hannah cuts through the noise by outlining what works, what doesn't, and what we urgently need to focus on so we can leave a sustainable planet for future generations.
These problems are big. But they are solvable. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone. Let's turn that opportunity into reality.
Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading
by Chris Anderson
"If you want to help create a more equitable world but don't know where to start, Infectious Generosity is for you." – Bill Gates, GatesNotes
The bestselling author, media pioneer, and curator of TED explores one of humankind's defining but overlooked impulses, and how we can super-charge its potential to build a hopeful future.
Let's face it: Recent years have been tough on optimists. Hopes that the Internet might bring people together have been crushed by the ills of social media. Is there a way back?
As head of TED, Chris Anderson has had a ringside view of the world's boldest thinkers sharing their most uplifting ideas. Inspired by them, he believes that it's within our grasp to turn outrage back into optimism. It all comes down to reimagining one of the most fundamental human virtues: generosity. What if generosity could become infectious generosity?
Through telling inspiring stories in his new book, Anderson has given us "the first page-turner ever written about human generosity" (Elizabeth Dunn). More important, he offers a playbook for how to embark on our own generous acts – whether gifts of money, time, talent, connection, or kindness – and to prime them, thanks to the Internet, to have self-replicating, even world-changing, impact.
The Message
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER - NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The renowned author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell – and the ones we don't – shape our realities.
"Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose. . . . These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race." –Associated Press
"Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely." –Booklist (starred review)
Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic "Politics and the English Language," but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories – our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking – expose and distort our realities.
In the first of the book's three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book's banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation's recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city – a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book's longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.
Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country's most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world – and our own souls – and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
Burn Book: A Tech Love Story
by Kara Swisher
Instant New York Times Bestseller
From award-winning journalist Kara Swisher comes a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead.
"Swisher, the bad-ass journalist and OG chronicler of Silicon Valley . . . takes no prisoners in this highly readable look at the evolution of the digital world...Bawdy, brash, and compulsively thought-provoking, just like its author, Burn Book sizzles" (Booklist, starred review).
Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech's most powerful players. From "the queen of all media" (Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal), this is the inside story we've all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.
When tech titans crowed that they would "move fast and break things," Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. While covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s, she developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the facts about this new world order. Her consistent scoops drove one CEO to accuse her of "listening in the heating ducts" and prompted Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg to once observe: "It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, 'I hope Kara never sees this.'"
While still in college, Swisher got her start at The Washington Post, where she became one of the few people in journalism interested in covering the nascent Internet. She went on to work for The Wall Street Journal, joining with Walt Mossberg to start the groundbreaking D: All Things Digital conference, as well as pioneering tech news sites.
Swisher has interviewed everyone who matters in tech over three decades, right when they presided over an explosion of world-changing innovation that has both helped and hurt our world. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Bob Iger, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg are just a few whom Swisher made sweat – figuratively and, in Zuckerberg's case, literally.
Despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech's potential to help solve problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better, more thoughtful choices, even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again. At its heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone.
Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV
by Emily Nussbaum
The rollicking saga of reality television, a "sweeping" (The Washington Post) cultural history of America's most influential, most divisive artistic phenomenon, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker writer – "a must-read for anyone interested in television or popular culture" (NPR)
"Passionate, exquisitely told . . . With muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail . . . [Nussbaum] knits her talents for sharp analysis and telling reportage well." –The New York Times (Editors' Choice)
LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION
Who invented reality television, the world's most dangerous pop-culture genre? And why can't we look away? In this revelatory, deeply reported account of the rise of "dirty documentary" – from its contentious roots in radio to the ascent of Donald Trump – Emily Nussbaum unearths the origin story of the genre that ate the world, as told through the lively voices of the people who built it. At once gimlet-eyed and empathetic, Cue the Sun! explores the morally charged, funny, and sometimes tragic consequences of the hunt for something real inside something fake.
In sharp, absorbing prose, Nussbaum traces the jagged fuses of experimentation that exploded with Survivor at the turn of the millennium. She introduces the genre's trickster pioneers, from the icy Allen Funt to the shambolic Chuck Barris; Cops auteur John Langley; cynical Bachelor ringmaster Mike Fleiss; and Jon Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim, the visionaries behind The Real World – along with dozens of stars from An American Family, The Real World, Big Brother, Survivor, and The Bachelor. We learn about the tools of the trade – like the Frankenbite, a deceptive editor's best friend – and ugly tales of exploitation. But Cue the Sun! also celebrates reality's peculiar power: a jolt of emotion that could never have come from a script.
What happened to the first reality stars, the Louds – and why won't they speak to the couple who filmed them? Which serial killer won on The Dating Game? Nussbaum explores reality TV as a strike-breaker, the queer roots of Bravo, the dark truth behind The Apprentice, and more. A shrewd observer who adores television, Nussbaum is the ideal voice for the first substantive history of the genre that, for better or worse, made America what it is today.
The Burning Earth: A History
by Sunil Amrith
In this magisterial book, historian Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and eco-cide, of an extraordinary expansion of human freedom and its planetary costs. Drawing on an extraordinarily rich diversity of primary sources, he reckons with the ruins of Portuguese silver mining in Peru, British gold mining in South Africa, and oil extraction in Central Asia. He explores the railroads and highways that brought humans to new terrains of battle against each other and against stubborn nature. Amrith's account of the ways in which the First and Second World Wars involved the massive mobilization not only of men, but of other natural resources from around the globe, provides an essential new way of understanding war as an irreversible reshaping of the planet. So too does this book reveal the reality of migration as consequence of environmental harm.
The imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit, joined with new forms of energy and new possibilities of freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, has brought change to every inch of the Earth. Amrith relates in gorgeous prose, and on the largest canvas, a mind-altering epic – vibrant with stories, characters, and vivid images – in which humanity might find the collective wisdom to save itself.
The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist's Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life
by Nathalie A. Cabrol
One of the world's leading astrobiologists takes us on an awe-inspiring journey across the cosmos to investigate some of humanity's most profound questions: Are we alone in the universe? And how did life on Earth begin?
We are in a golden age in astronomy, living on the cusp of breakthroughs that will revolutionize our understanding of our place in the cosmos. Yet a profound question remains: Are we alone in the universe?
We have never been closer to answering this question. In The Secret Life of the Universe, celebrated astrobiologist and the director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute Nathalie A. Cabrol takes us to the frontiers of the search for life. The book's odyssey begins by exploring how life began on Earth in order to understand what's necessary for its existence elsewhere. What role did our moon play? And could life on Mars have seeded life on Earth?
Cabrol continues this dazzling interplanetary tour, illuminating the likeliest places for life in our neighborhood: While Mars and the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn are among the top contenders, recent missions are redefining the limits of habitability to include unexpected worlds. Finally, we seek life beyond our solar system, becoming witness to a revolution in the night sky: the realization that there are as many planets as stars in our galaxy. With more than 300 million exoplanets in the habitable zone of their stars in the Milky Way alone, to think we are alone, or the only advanced intelligent civilization, may be little more than nonsense.
The Secret Life of the Universe is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the search for life--"a mind-altering and exhilarating read for anyone who has ever wondered: are we alone?" (Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk).