77 books like Rising

Nature’s Metropolis is a rare work that transforms scholarship, yet whose easy flow and engaging tone make it approachable for non-specialists.

Its main arguments —how humans and cities are embedded in nature, the interwoven, strained ties between rural and urban, and how technologies transformed our connection to nature— are guiding themes of my own work. 

Reading the passage in this book about a sack’s journey, on how grain moved from farm to market before and after the appearance of the train in the West, was the spark that lit my imagination on how packaging transformed modern foodways.

If I’m being completely honest, I bought this book because of my very large professional crush on both of the editors. I work in climate science, so I have signed up to have my heart destroyed over and over again. I read about all the species that are dying and threatened, the ecosystems collapsing, the fishermen fighting for their livelihoods, and the coastal communities slammed by storms.

This book covered all these topics, but if you’re going to learn about this, (as we all should), we also have to be given the reasons to keep at it. We have to not lose the will to fight or the ability to see beautiful, generative, and imaginative solutions and outcomes. This book helps with that, too. 

Climate- and environmental activist Greta Thunberg is often most recognized as the voice of the youth climate movement. However, there are many children around the world, standing up to fight climate change as older generations sit idle. In 2015, twenty-one young people from across America sued the federal government over climate change, arguing that actions promoting the fossil fuel economy violate their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property.

Journalist Lee van der Voo brings the experiences of children living in our rapidly changing world to light, as the plaintiffs describe their experiences with floods, fire, drought, and disappearing coastlines. As the World Burns reveals the deep concerns that the next generation holds about the climate crisis and their justified demands for government action.

When it comes to the massive issue of climate change, even citizens who are very concerned often wonder, “What can I really do to help?” The scale of the problem requires global action, but often people are left feeling like their actions alone can’t begin to make a difference. In Inconspicuous Consumption, former New York Times science writer Tatiana Schlossberg opens our eyes to the fact that our everyday choices in such a convenience-driven society contribute to the climate crisis.

Schlossberg unveils the hidden environmental impacts behind the Internet and technology, food, fashion, and fuel and traces the far-reaching effects of our daily living in a super-connected world. But, even more importantly, she shows us that our choices, such as what we eat or what we wear, could also be a part of the many solutions needed, too. In terms of a carbon footprint, I finally got a great… show more.

What if we get it wrong? What if the scale and pace of our collective measures to address climate destabilisation and the biodiversity crisis remain insufficient?

Oreskes and Conway provide the imagined view of a historian of the “Second People's Republic of China” from 2393. His account describes how the political and economic elites of the early decades of the twenty-first century ignored or dismissed the clear warnings of climate catastrophe.

Soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, drought, and mass migrations resulted in “The Great Collapse of 2093”. Three centuries later as the world emerges from the “Penumbral Age’ it is a more subdued and thoughtful place. 

By dramatizing an all-too-plausible ‘ghastly’ outcome, the authors seek to galvanise the energies of readers to rise from their armchairs and act. We should all strive to ensure that the book remains firmly on the shelves of fiction.

Set in Japan in the period just before World War II, this is the story of Sachiko and her three sisters.

Yukiko is in need of a husband, but she is stiff in her old-fashioned habits. Taeko, by contrast, is a rebel who sleeps with men and becomes pregnant. Sachiko, modeled by Tanizaki on his pretty and spirited wife, loves all of her sisters and feels responsible for them.

I found the picture of the sisters’ daily life, which was by turns cosmopolitan, traditional, and modern, fascinating in its detail. One thing follows another, open-ended, surprising, and completely authentic in feel. I cannot recommend this book enough!

I like the way John Englander took a timely and relevant topic—rising sea levels—that could have been technical and dry and presented it in an engaging way with his writing and clear and simple graphics so that virtually anyone can pick this book up and understand why the oceans are rising and what this means for our collective future.

One of the first contemporary novels to take climate change seriously, and still one of the best.

The plot concerns a woman who finds millions of Monarch butterflies living in the valley near her Tennessee home, only to discover once scientists arrive that they have been driven from their native home farther south by the accelerating pace of global warming.

The novel takes a strong political stance but still manages to avoid becoming didactic, a real achievement when you consider how polarizing a subject climate change has become.

This atypically slim Dickens novel is set not in London but in the fictional city of “Coketown,” a mill-town that is on the verge of industrialization.

It features some of Dickens’s most memorable characters, including the draconian schoolmaster Gradgrind, but also contains profound descriptions of the damage that industrial civilization was already wreaking on the English countryside, such as when Dickens describes a set of factory machines as “melancholy mad elephants” that eventually consume the industrial baron who owns them.

This book is one I didn’t want to put down and I don’t say this about most non-fiction books. Rosanna Xia, from her many years as a writer for the Los Angeles Times on coastal issues, has taken a topic that is of critical importance to all coastal cities and residents in California and beyond and through conversations with a wide variety of people in a handful of coastal communities makes this story engaging, interesting, and insightful.

The sea level is rising and we are in the way. We are now presented with massive challenges around the planet, and the coast of California and its diverse people and attitudes are a microcosm of this larger dilemma. Rosanna captures the diversity of opinions and perspectives in a very understandable and enlightening book that will be pertinent for many years to come.

Quite frankly, I loved this book and didn’t want it… show more.