Reviews
The Fragile Earth: Writing from the New Yorker on Climate Change by David Remnick, Henry Finder
mcastello13's review against another edition
challenging
informative
sad
slow-paced
3.75
There’s a lot of great writing here, all of it important (in my view), but at the same time I’m left wondering what exactly the point of a book like this is. Things related to the climate crisis move so quickly that a lot of this feels irrelevant now, although of course not all of it. So, while I appreciated the writing, I’m not sure it was worth it.
ceris's review
I really enjoyed most of these essays! This is a really fantastic and thoughtful collection.
bookish_spoonie's review
3.0
3.5 stars
This was a really interesting book filled with over 20 articles from The New Yorker about climate change and related issues. I have worked for a climate change charity and keep up with news surrounding this area so I was interested to see how much I would find new and interesting.
This is a long book! At 560 pages, I found that the 20+ articles were a few too many and that there was a decent amount of repetition. Infelt some articles could have been left out and that it would have been a better book.
The Fragile Earth covers many different areas relatednto climate change including the science and history of climate change, effects on oceanic creatures, acidification of oceans and coral reefs, melting of ice caps, mass extinctions, carbon neutral power and carbon footprints and meat eating and the horrendous effects of the meat industry. There are a lot of case studies and each article has it's own focus.
I really enjoyed reading about half of the articles and some I found rather monotonous and not needed. I personally didn't learn a great deal but still found the content to be interesting and useful to know.
Some articles were written in a more approachable manner than others which makes a huge difference especially when many readers may not be that knowledgeable about climate change.
I am unsure who the target market is for this book as I don't think those that know nothing about climate change should read this book as there are much better and more succinct books out there. For those that are already knowledgeable, there wasn't a huge amount of new information as all of the articles are written at least a decade ago.
Overall, it was a decent read but too long and I wouldn't recommend this book as there are mich better climate change books to read.
Please note that I was gifted this ebook in exchange for an honest review.
This was a really interesting book filled with over 20 articles from The New Yorker about climate change and related issues. I have worked for a climate change charity and keep up with news surrounding this area so I was interested to see how much I would find new and interesting.
This is a long book! At 560 pages, I found that the 20+ articles were a few too many and that there was a decent amount of repetition. Infelt some articles could have been left out and that it would have been a better book.
The Fragile Earth covers many different areas relatednto climate change including the science and history of climate change, effects on oceanic creatures, acidification of oceans and coral reefs, melting of ice caps, mass extinctions, carbon neutral power and carbon footprints and meat eating and the horrendous effects of the meat industry. There are a lot of case studies and each article has it's own focus.
I really enjoyed reading about half of the articles and some I found rather monotonous and not needed. I personally didn't learn a great deal but still found the content to be interesting and useful to know.
Some articles were written in a more approachable manner than others which makes a huge difference especially when many readers may not be that knowledgeable about climate change.
I am unsure who the target market is for this book as I don't think those that know nothing about climate change should read this book as there are much better and more succinct books out there. For those that are already knowledgeable, there wasn't a huge amount of new information as all of the articles are written at least a decade ago.
Overall, it was a decent read but too long and I wouldn't recommend this book as there are mich better climate change books to read.
Please note that I was gifted this ebook in exchange for an honest review.
lilyaronovitz's review
3.0
This rating is solely based on my own enjoyment of this anthology, and in no way reflects the quality of writing or material in these essays. Of course, given that this is a collection of New Yorker essays, the writing in all of them is great, they are well-researched, and generally have a nice balance between anecdotal and more fact-heavy. However, I'm not sure if this book is necessarily meant to be read cover to cover. It's extremely long, informationally dense at times, and at least in my own opinion, not the most engaging or captivating anthology. I saw this written in another review and found that I agree: the target audience for this novel is a little bit unclear. It's not fully fact-based, so it's not the most succinctly informative for someone looking to learn more about global warming, but I'm not sure if the perspectives are unique enough to present enough particularly new or groundbreaking information for someone who already has a baseline knowledge about global warming to be really worthwhile for someone only moderately interested in the topic. Overall, the novel seemed to lack a pointed purpose, other than organizing various climate-change-oriented essays into one place. Granted, this gripe can also be interpreted the other way, as the stories were so different from each other that they all offered a take on a different aspect of climate change and the way it affects society.
There's no doubt these stories are important, and I liked the fact that they presented perspectives on climate change other than the ones we hear the most about, like just the rise in temperature, the depletion of the ozone, etc. I feel that most of my complaints could be avoided by reading this book in conjunction with maybe something more light-hearted or engaging, and so that you're not reading it from cover to cover all at once.
There's no doubt these stories are important, and I liked the fact that they presented perspectives on climate change other than the ones we hear the most about, like just the rise in temperature, the depletion of the ozone, etc. I feel that most of my complaints could be avoided by reading this book in conjunction with maybe something more light-hearted or engaging, and so that you're not reading it from cover to cover all at once.
david_p1's review
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
An engaging anthology of essays. Many in a reflective sense, issues we’ve know about for decades and yet these voices rang hollow in the halls of decision making. There are some glimmers of hope for potential actions and paths forward, though none without consequence, as we’ve crossed a few too many thresholds to completely avert climate change. Kolbert puts it bluntly in the afterword, “At this point, there's
simply no possible future that averts dislocation. Billions of people will have to dramatically change the way they live or the world will change dramatically or we will see some combination of the two. My experience reporting on climate change, which now spans almost twenty years, has convinced me that the most extreme out-comes are, unfortunately, among the most likely. As the warnings have grown more dire and the consequences of warming more obvious, emissions have only increased that much faster.”
A few more good quotes:
- “If our way of life is ending nature, it is not too radical to talk about transforming our way of life.”
- “Life is precarious, and you can crush it by holding on too tightly, or you can love it…Even in a world of dying, new lives co tiniest to be born.”
- [On managed retreat], “not everybody is going to live where they are now and continue their way of life, and that is a terrible, and emotional reality to face.”
- “Climate change is not so much a reduction in productivity as a redistribution, and it’s one in which the poorest people on earth get hit the hardest and the rich world benefits.”
It’s hard to finish this collection and not walk away sensing the doom and gloom is already on the horizon. I suppose the only respite is we just have to keep moving forward because there is no other way. Finding the solace in the next day. And if we can make things a little better along the way then let’s do it wholeheartedly.