Can we survive climate change? This learned book suggests that we can, but it won’t be easy.
A long look back at human interactions with changing climate issues in the past.
Archaeologists Fagan and Durrani, the former of whom has written about climate and natural resources in several popular books, survey the “story of how our ancestors adapted to…myriad shifts, large and small,” as portions of the world alternately heated and cooled. One adaptation of long standing is simply to move, as Ancestral Puebloan people did when a centurylong drought settled over what is now the Southwestern U.S. Ecological refugees who are leaving present-day drought-stricken zones in places such as the Sahel are evidence of “the ancient survival strategy of mobility on a truly massive scale.” The massive drought that has settled over the present-day Southwest does not afford the same ability. As exploding population in the region, the authors write, has “placed major stresses on groundwater and other scarce water supplies as global warming intensifies.” Given that mass migration “is no longer a viable option in our time,” it’s up to modern planners to figure out a way to ensure the chances of our survival. While questioning our near-religious faith in the thought that technology can somehow save us, the authors allow that it will help, even as we continue to wreak catastrophic damage. Megadroughts in places such as the Southwest and India are not our only concern; the authors write of climate change–induced flooding and plagues, noting that the difference between present and past is that the natural alterations of old are now human-caused. What we do have going for us, the authors conclude in this accessible survey, is our ability to think problems through. “In planning adaptations to future climate change,” they write, “we need to maximize those enduring qualities that will sustain us as we plan decisive adaptations for the future.” That includes local leadership to address local effects.
Can we survive climate change? This learned book suggests that we can, but it won’t be easy.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-5087-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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