Book cover of Cities of the Plain

Book description

First published in 1994. Environmental issues present a daunting challenge to the international system. The destruction of the tropical rainforest, the Chernobyl explosion and the ozone layer 'hole' all underline the transnational nature of environmental threats and the need for states to act together in order to tackle them. How…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Cities of the Plain as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

By now, McCarthy is well known for his books on the Southwest. Cities of the Plain is painfully overlooked.

I read it in college as a precocious creative writing major and fell in love because the towns mentioned (Belén, where my grandmother was born, as example) were familiar to me and yet I had no idea these nowhere places of my youth were known to anybody else in the world, to say nothing about their value to any artistic form.

Unlike All the Pretty Horses, Cities of the Plain has zero romanticism to it: it’s a contemporary, hard-driven tale…

If you love Cities of the Plain...

Book cover of The Last Whaler

The Last Whaler by Cynthia Reeves,

This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…

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