The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Unabridged)
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4.4 • 131 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon
With a new afterword
It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation.
An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.
The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s.
Praise for The Uninhabitable Earth
“The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times
“Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist
“Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
“The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post
“The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books
Customer Reviews
Very insightful
This book is well-organized and informative. I would recommend it to anyone looking to inform themselves on the threat of climate change.
Four stars because the audio quality is suboptimal. It’s not a dealbreaker.
Lacks a coherent perspective
While there’s quite a few illuminating and useful data points here, there’s a real lack of any organizing principle to the book. Instead it more seems like someone skimming through, and thinking out loud about, news clippings and synopses of scientific papers and other books, at random.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that it’s tough to know what the audience of this book is intended to be. If you’re caught up on the basics of the climate crisis, it often tediously belabors the obvious. And if you’re not already caught up, The endless spewing out of the minutia of facts and figures and names and reports makes it unlikely you’ll come away with a coherent understanding of the situation.
Combine that with the fact that the material is now at least six years out of date and it’s not a book I could really recommend.
Feeds the narrative
David is a great writer and has distilled all of the sensational headlines about climate change from all of the usual alarmist suspects (you know who they are) and laid them out in a mosaic of shallow facts and misinformation. This is not a great book to read to children who are ill-equipped to question the motives of the Greenie Cult for power and money. For a better, more fact based view, you should read False Alarm by Lomborg.