Matching awe for the majestic intricacy and beauty of nature with exacting and alarming dispatches, Jamail calls on us to respect facts, honor life, and recognize that we are facing increasingly tragic disruptions and loss. Enlightening, heartbreaking, and necessary.
This book will help readers understand how ecosystems have been affected by climate change and how inaction has potentially doomed further generations.
Jamail’s journalistic skills allow him to evoke [the book's] details with a succinct power that many other accounts might lack, but the facts themselves, told to him by on expert after another, are as familiar as they are bleak ... Even in the book’s most optimistic moments, this sere tone remains.
Jamail’s deep love of nature blazes through his crisp, elegant prose, and he ably illuminates less-discussed aspects of climate disruption ... The constant assessment of Earth’s grim status can be a tad repetitive, but perhaps that’s the point, as Jamail infuses the book with a sense of reluctant futility ... A passionate, emotional ode to the wonders of our dying planet and to those who, hopelessly or not, dedicate their lives to trying to save it.
An unrelentingly depressing account of the current state of the environment ... [Jamail's] message is not entirely consistent; he echoes an expert in palliative care that 'the time to change our ways is long past,' but also endorses Vaclav Havel’s definition of hope as 'the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out,' suggesting some merit to changing policies. The hopelessness this book engenders makes its intended audience and scope of readership unclear.
