PositiveThe Times (UK)Richly detailed and frequently illuminating ... For general readers, though, the most interesting bits deal with cultural touchstones.
Greta Thunberg
PositiveThe Times (UK)The best thing about Greta Thunberg’s new book is that most of it isn’t written by Greta Thunberg. That really is a compliment ... But she’s also astute enough to recognise that most of us don’t know very much about climate science. More than a rallying call, what we need is a crash course ... The result is a hefty volume that looks fantastic, with beautifully rendered charts and haunting photographs ... The most striking chapters focus on how we live in the West. The American environmentalist Bill McKibben gives a brilliant introduction to fossil fuel ... Not all the chapters sing like McKibben’s, but the book is crammed with information ... But this book is not quite the one-stop shop for climate information that Thunberg says she intended. Nuclear power barely gets a mention, though it may end up being an important part of a net-zero future.
Ed Yong
RaveThe Times (UK)... a journey to alternative realities as extraordinary as any you’ll find in science fiction ... It is also a tour of places that are, in essence, unknowable. We will never really understand what it is like to be a bat, perceiving its surroundings through echolocation. Yet Yong — a gifted science writer who works for The Atlantic magazine and who won a Pulitzer prize last year for his reporting on Covid-19 — proves an outstanding guide ... It helps that he has a fantastic cast of characters ... Beautifully written and painstakingly researched, the book is brimming with these kinds of observations ... This is perhaps the highest compliment one can give to Yong: this fantastic book leaves you wondering what else is left to be discovered.
