Former New York Times science writer Schlossberg pens an upbeat look at the way climate change and environmental pollution are intimately involved in everyday life - in everything we use, buy, eat, wear, and how we get around - and have consequences that extend far beyond our lives.
... clever, informative, and unexpectedly charming ... Schlossberg is careful to remind readers that we’re all in this (planet) together ... Though the subject matter is bleak, Schlossberg takes care to emphasize that while individual choices matter, governmental and corporate transparency matters much, much more. To halt the climate crisis, we must first understand the many factors that create and sustain it, and this book offers the tools for that understanding. The author breaks complex issues down to be understandable to the lay reader, while her humor and wit ensure that readers will close the book feeling energized rather than hopeless.
This book careens and skitters across the landscape of its topic, which means I now know a number of interesting things I didn’t know when I picked it up ... [Tatiana Schlossberg] has not done a great deal of original reporting — the book includes accounts of just a few short trips. But she has scoured the internet for pretty much every scary and fascinating statistic on her subject that you can imagine, and her time has been well spent. You come away from her book with a stronger sense of the sheer largeness of the human enterprise ... When I picked up this book, I feared it might go down the same cul-de-sacs, but it doesn’t ... fighting for the Green New Deal makes more mathematical sense than trying to take on the planet one commodity at a time. And that, interestingly, is where Schlossberg seems to come out, even as she conducts her rambling tour of each of those commodities ... there are a few places where her reporting covers issues that few people know about and everyone should ... I confess that Schlossberg’s writing style grates on me — the rate of cutesy asides per page is diabetic. But she deserves real credit for coming through her journey into the guts of the consumer machine with a clarifying insight.
Although Schlossberg’s asides sometimes derail the journalistic narrative, with this call for mass action she presents valuable information that could help readers make more sustainable choices in their lives.
