In a ruminative but urgent treatise, historian Popkin (The Year of the Return) takes a philosophical approach to climate change, drawing analogies to other crises in human history. He begins by discussing the climate crisis as a global rallying point and by pinpointing its major causes, from the outsize political influence of fossil fuel companies to consumer culture, while recalling how his experience working for an environmental group demonstrated to him why activism is often ineffective. Popkin’s analysis picks up steam when he cites Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil”—originally formulated in reference to those who actively or passively facilitated Nazism’s crimes—to argue that, with humanity careening toward another historic catastrophe, silence and inaction about climate change is morally unacceptable. He also discusses, more briefly, how the medieval world reacted to the Black Death, and draws from the works of Italo Calvino, Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and more. Admitting that concrete solutions to the climate crisis are beyond his purview, he concludes by urging others who are concerned about the environment to channel their concerns into action. In a glut of books on the topic, Popkin’s is notable for its thought-provoking longview perspective on how to think about and face climate change. (Dec.)

 Yet another great advance review of Nathaniel Popkin's forthcoming book, TO REACH THE SPRING:

"How can we go diligently about our business while the daily disasters of climate change are already visibly recasting natural processes, forcing migration and violence? 'We are the most slippery kind of criminal,' explains Nathaniel Popkin in his searching new book TO REACH THE SPRING. And he's right, Americans (especially middle class and wealthy white Americans) have built up a resistance to the consciousness of their own complicity in the climate crisis. Exerting privilege without feeling privileged, we go about our quotidian consumption, and destruction, consumed by worry but never taking real action. Simultaneously told as a letter to a future descendant, a history of disaster, a personal confession, and a lie-stabbing op-ed, Popkin has crafted a read so melancholy and spiritual you won't lay it aside until you're done." —Scott Gabriel Knowles, author of The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America

Just posted: an incredibly moving interview with our author Mark Lyons about his work helping immigrants tell their own stories.

Pictured below: the cover of the book by Liliana Velásquez that Mark talks about in the interview, plus the cover of the memoir he wrote for us, describing the early experiences that helped make him the activist, caring, empathetic person he is today. Click on either image for more info.