This solarpunk novel takes an optimistic but clear-eyed view of a near future in which the disruptions of climate change cannot be ignored and authoritarians within the U.S. (and the protagonist's family) don't just magically go away. If you need to book to tell you how to keep going in hard times, this book may be for you.
It’s thirty years from now. We’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But what about all the angry old people who can’t let go?
For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn't controversial. It's just an overwhelming fact of life. And so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It…
I've been meaning to read this book for years, and when a friend gave it to me, it jumped to the top of my pile and screwed up the rest of my summer reading plans. This is a historic overview (informed by a lot of primary research) that lays out the water crisis in the American West in a paradigm-breaking manner that has influenced a generation of sustainability efforts.
This version was a second edition with a new afterword, and I noticed how the book was originally written during a nadir of bull-headed dam building and bureaucratic inertia. It was striking to me to realize how many awful plans that were in the works when the book was written (i.e. diverting water from British Columbia to California) never actually came to pass with the rise of the environmental movement, and the new afterword is almost optimistic because at least now the problems are understood if not solved.
Another takeaway: the whole concept of Phoenix is a bad, bad idea that is not going to end well.
"The definitive work on the West's water crisis." --Newsweek
The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruption and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecological and economic disaster. In his landmark book, Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants, the Bureau…
I listened to Miranda July read this as an audiobook, which led to some funny moments when I had it playing in the kitchen while I was making dinner around my family. The book veers(sometimes mid-sentence) from thoughtful meditations on the pleasures of domestic life or childrearing into explicit sexual descriptions, which left me leaping to pause my phone before I had to explain what was going on to whoever was within earshot. What was going on was a complicated bit of truth-telling by July's protagonist, who was trying to envision a fulfilling and authentic life while knowing that none of her personal decisions were only going to impact her alone. This one leaves you with a lot to think about.
The New York Times bestselling author returns with an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious and surprising novel about a woman upending her life
“A frank novel about a midlife awakening, which is funnier and more boldly human than you ever quite expect….the bravery of All Fours is nothing short of riveting.”—Vogue
“A novel that presses into that tender bruise about the anxiety of aging, of what it means to have a female body that is aging, and wanting the freedom to live a fuller life…Deeply funny and achingly true.” —LA Times
The Cord, a Midwest Book Award finalist, is a science fiction novel that follows life along both ends of a space elevator that connects an orbiting space station to an equatorial island. Envisioned as a secure and enjoyable place to work and visit, the cord is a valuable resource—one that people are willing to fight for to gain control. Travel along with a robot repairman who uncovers a disturbing conspiracy, a teenage girl who is caught up in a revolution, and a tour guide in space trying to re-establish a lost connection with his brother on Earth. The Cord is written in a reverse narrative format that emphasizes the fragile but essential ties across generations.
