"No Impact Man is a deeply honest and riveting account of the year in which Colin Beavan and his wife attempted to do what most of us would consider impossible. What might seem inconvenient to the point of absurdity instead teaches lessons that all of us need to learn. We as individuals can take action to address important social problems. One person can make a difference."—Marion Nestle, author of What to Eat

"The next president has no time to waste in building a post-carbon economy. This book is a distillation of the best policy advice he will get from anyone on the most important issue of our time."—David W. Orr, Paul Sears Distinguished Professor, Oberlin College

“A remarkably readable and compelling account of the important advances in our understanding of the complexity of global climate that have taken place over the past 40 years. The book is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand the unique nature of the climate change underway today.”—Michael McElroy, Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies, Harvard University

"One of the most comprehensive and readable accounts of [this] phenomenon . . . For people trying to figure out how our species fits, or doesn't, into the natural order, there is no more interesting subject than the blending of the native and the exotic. And no more interesting an introduction than this fine book."—Bill McKibben, The Boston Globe

“Cousteau consecrated his life to teaching the world about marvels that are at once exotic to us and yet ordinary in the abyss of the ocean. Through his lyrical writings and his films that took your breath away, he placed the underwater world at the door of an audience as extensive as the oceans themselves. I always learned with him.”—Al Gore 

“[A] fascinating account of shifting climatic conditions and their consequences from about A.D. 800 to 1300, often referred to as the Medieval Warm Period . . . Mr. Fagan, an anthropologist who has written on climate change in The Long Summer and The Little Ice Age, proceeds methodically, working his way across the globe and reading the evidence provided by tree rings, deep-sea cores, coral samples, computer weather models and satellite photos. The picture that emerges remains blurry . . . but it has sharpened considerably over the past 40 years, enough for Mr. Fagan to present a coherent account of profound changes in human societies from the American Southwest to the Huang He River basin in China.”—William Grimes, The New York Times

"When the Soviet Union chucked Sputnik into space in 1957, it galvanized America to come from behind and win the space race. The federal government opened its checkbook to finance an array of projects. Students shifted to new subjects like astronautical engineering and Russian studies to help the United States understand and eclipse the Soviet Union. The moon shot inspired a patriotic nation and produced useful commercial technologies along the way. The space race was expensive, but it worked. Thomas L. Friedman’s latest book is a plea for a new Sputnik moment. His breezy tour of America’s energy policy documents a nation that has become dangerously dependent on fossil fuels . . . Mr. Friedman’s voice is compelling and will be widely heard . . . Mr. Friedman’s strength is his diagnosis of our energy and environmental nightmares . . . The most intriguing chapter in Mr. Friedman’s book is his last, which poses the toughest challenge. Can America be like China, where a visionary government can impose a new direction on the country in the face of national emergency? Or will America devolve into a country that is so mired in red tape and local opposition that it builds absolutely nothing anywhere, near anything? Societies like that get stuck because they can’t embrace new technologies, like the cherished wind turbines and the power lines needed to carry their current . . . Heads will be nodding across airport lounges, as readers absorb Mr. Friedman’s common sense about how America and the world are dangerously addicted to cheap fossil fuels while we recklessly use the atmosphere as a dumping ground for carbon dioxide. The Sputnik is heading into orbit, thanks to high energy prices, growing fear of the changing climate and pleas like Mr. Friedman’s. But whether we as a nation—and with us, the world—are really prepared to do anything to solve the problem is still in doubt."—David Victor, The New York Times

A Reenchanted World reveals the many ways in which our self-imposed exile from our original network of natural relationships is civilization’s most disorienting misstep. Fortunately for us, James William Gibson gives us a compass back to that very sane, very grounded place. This is a wisely haunting, soulful book.”—Carl Safina, author of Song for the Blue Ocean and Voyage of the Turtle

"As a user-friendly introduction to global warming and a succinct summary of many of the central arguments laid out in those other volumes, An Inconvenient Truth is lucid, harrowing and bluntly effective . . . Like Mr. Gore's 1992 book Earth in the Balance, this volume displays an earnest, teacherly tone, but it's largely free of the New Age psychobabble and A-student grandiosity that rumbled through that earlier book. The author's wonky fascination with policy minutiae has been tamed in these pages, and his love of charts and graphs has been put to good use . . . In this multimedia day of shorter attention spans and high-profile authors, An Inconvenient Truth could play a similar role in galvanizing public opinion about a real and present danger. It could goad the public into reading more scholarly books on the subject, and it might even push awareness of global warming to a real tipping point—and beyond."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"At a time when [California's] residency has been forecast to grow by 13 million in the next 25 years, with its population probably stretching into its farthest regions, Mining California offers sobering reading on the consequences of unchecked expansion."—Tess Taylor, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

“If you want to understand the future of international relations, worry less about ideology and more about oil reserves. Michael Klare's superb new book explains, in haunting detail, the trends that will lead us into a series of dangerous traps, unless we muster the will to transform the way we use energy in this country. As illuminating as it is unsettling.”—Bill McKibben, author The Bill McKibben Reader

"[Elizabeth Kolbert's] research is thorough. She gleaned much of her information from personal interviews and visits to localities around the world. Although she is clearly distressed by the lack of concern of the Bush administration about global warming and climate change, Kolbert tends not to use alarmist language to argue for a particular viewpoint, choosing instead to let her stories and interviews do the talking. That is an effective approach to a topic that could, in less-skilled hands, make for dull reading. And by the end of the book, the reader will have no doubt that the problem is a serious one."—Doug Macdougall, The Chronicle of Higher Education

"The matters on which Lear chooses to focus her work are so genuinely interesting . . . I am struggling to think of a writer who comes across as more humanly admirable than the energetic, blunt, determined, and always truthful Beatrix Potter."—The New York Review of Books

"It would be unwise to dismiss McKibben's ideas as pipe dreams or Luddism. He makes his case on anecdotal, environmental, moral and, as it were, aesthetic grounds. An attentive, widely traveled writer and environmentalist, McKibben cites the success of local projects around the world, from a rabbit-raising academy in China to a Guatemalan cooperative that manufactures farm machinery from old bicycles."—Lance Morrow, The New York Times Book Review

Drawing on the experience of 1,400 Step It Up organizers in all fifty states, Bill McKibben—the author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy—and the Step It Up team explain how you can build the fight in your community, college, or place of worship.

"Terra is a much-needed book on the human condition that could have been written only by a paleontologist with a thorough, field-based knowledge of evolutionary and environmental biology. Starting with the birth of Earth’s modern ecosystems in the Age of dinosaurs, Novacek explains how the living environment came together in a way that yielded humanity and why our careless destruction of it is a profound and eternal loss."—Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University

“Michael Shnayerson has ventured into one of the roughest and remotest parts of America and emerged with a brilliant and devastating work on the greed of the coal mining industry. I found myself hoping that certain people named in this book will read it and experience that sick fear of knowing their game is about to come to an end. Indeed, that is one of the very satisfying things about this book: As horrifying as the story is, there is the real and very beautiful possibility that justice will prevail in the end.”—Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm

"A delightful chronicle of the animals that come out to hunt and play in the park at night . . . conveys the magic and enduring mysteries of Central Park."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times