Here are 100 books that A Cold Welcome fans have personally recommended if you like
A Cold Welcome.
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Many believe the planet's energy needs can be provided carbon-free, with solar, wind, and water carrying the load. Coal, oil, and natural gas use will fade away. It’s an appealing vision. But the numbers don’t back it up for seven billion people, many looking in on the comfortable lifestyles of the wealthy countries and thinking: “What about us?”. Humanity needs a mix of energy sources, and nuclear energy is a carbon-free power source that can deliver at scale. I’m a nuclear physicist by training, recently retired from North Carolina State University, with interests in cosmology, energy research and policy, science education, and neutron and neutrino physics.
Putting in the numbers is what Gates does in his book. Climate change is real, no question. How to address it is where the controversy comes in. I really like that from the outset, Gates proposes five questions to consider whenever climate change is discussed: what fraction of the annual carbon dioxide emission are you removing? What’s your plan for cement? How much electrical power will be needed, what’s the cost, and how much space will it take up?
But he’s optimistic that zero emissions can be reached. He argues there are many options to explore, including nuclear, and says, contrary to much of the news reporting, don’t focus on 2030; focus instead on 2050 to give the best solutions time to emerge.
In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical - and accessible - plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe.
Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide toward certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I‘m a pediatrician in Reno, the fastest-warming city in the US. I also have a background in environmental science. I’ve seen the impacts of climate change on children first-hand, especially the impact of worsening wildfire smoke from “mega-fires” in California. It is impossible for me to look at babies and children suffering the impacts of worsening smoke, smog, allergies, heat, natural disasters, and infectious diseases and not see that the most powerful industry in history has unloaded the cost of their business onto the least powerful. I am passionate about this topic because I see climate change as a crime against children, who are especially vulnerable to its effects.
I love this book because of its moral clarity and historical detail. It’s an essential book for anyone trying to understand the politics that have paralyzed action for so long.
Dr. Mann describes how, for decades, the fossil fuel industry has waged war on the planet and humanity (not to mention climate scientists) through propaganda, lobbying, and purchasing politicians, even though they’ve known for 50 years what they were doing.
It changed how I interpret many things I see on social media; I feel better equipped to recognize bots from the industry and petrostates.
Shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year award
A renowned climate scientist shows how fossil fuel companies have waged a thirty-year campaign to deflect blame and responsibility and delay action on climate change, and offers a battle plan for how we can save the planet.
Recycle. Fly less. Eat less meat. These are some of the ways that we've been told can slow climate change. But the inordinate emphasis on individual behavior is the result of a marketing campaign that has succeeded in placing the responsibility for fixing climate change squarely on the shoulders of individuals.
Hans Ohanian is a physicist who has taught at several universities before retiring to engage in full-time research, writing, and acting as reviewer for several scientific journals. In one of his first books he included two chapters on “Energy, entropy, and environment” and “Nuclear energy.” This gave him valuable expertise for reviewing the five great books he recommends here.
This is a pie-in-the-sky 30-year plan for reducing CO2 in the atmosphere by joint worldwide implementation of 80 “solutions.” For each of these, the book proposes a number of giga-tons of CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere and the resulting dollar cost and savings.
I admire Hawken for his quantitative approach and his imaginative list of “solutions.” The numbers reveal the enormity of the drawdown enterprise. Some “solutions” are merely the usual renewables. Some came as a nice surprise to me, such as LED lanterns with batteries and small solar panels for residents in off-the-grid regions.
But I fear many of the solutions will never be rigorously implemented and would have a high policing cost to ensure compliance. For instance, the first solution involves the collection of refrigerant gases from expiring air conditioners. Who will voluntarily pay for this?
The 100 most substantive solutions to reverse global warming, based on meticulous research by leading scientists and policymakers around the world
“At this point in time, the Drawdown book is exactly what is needed; a credible, conservative solution-by-solution narrative that we can do it. Reading it is an effective inoculation against the widespread perception of doom that humanity cannot and will not solve the climate crisis. Reported by-effects include increased determination and a sense of grounded hope.” —Per Espen Stoknes, Author, What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming
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…
Brian Fagan is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of numerous books about archaeology, the past, and climate change for general audiences. I was asked to write my first climate change book (on El Niños) and was astounded to find that few archaeologists or historians focused on the subject, whether ancient or modern. Now that’s all changed, thanks to the revolution in paleoclimatology. I’m convinced that the past has much to tell us about climate change in the future. Apart from that, the subject is fascinating and vital.
The Third Horseman combines a discussion of climate change with a major disaster, the great famine of the fourteenth century. Vividly written and fast-paced, this well-written book makes history enjoyable. The author wears his research lightly, which makes for a rattling good story. Not a global book, but it will make you think.
The incredible true story of how a cycle of rain, cold, disease, and warfare created the worst famine in European history—years before the Black Death, from the author of Justinian's Flea and the forthcoming Miracle Cure
In May 1315, it started to rain. For the seven disastrous years that followed, Europeans would be visited by a series of curses unseen since the third book of Exodus: floods, ice, failures of crops and cattle, and epidemics not just of disease, but of pike, sword, and spear. All told, six million lives—one-eighth of Europe’s total population—would be lost.
Jenny Hale Pulsipher is a professor of history at Brigham Young University and the author of numerous articles and two award-winning books, Subjects unto theSame King: Indians, English, and the Contest of Authority in Early New England and Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England.
In Facing East, Richter uses both historical research and imagination to shift the perspective on early America from the west-facing European view to the east-facing Native American one. The result is a deeply researched, well written, and surprisingly moving book exploring a series of Native lives (Pocahontas, King Philip, Kateri Tekakwitha), events (Christian Indian missions, King Philip's War, the French and Indian War), and subjects (Native American trade, religion, the expansion of the English Empire).
In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers.
Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States.
Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make…
I’ve spent years studying individual people involved in the American Revolution, especially the British soldiers and their wives. These were the people who did the day-to-day work, and their stories deserve to be told. I troll archival collections to find original documents that allow me to piece together the lives of the thousands of individuals who made up the regiments and battalions, focusing not on what they had in common, but on how they were different from each other, part of a military society but each with their own lives and experiences. They made the history happen.
The issues that led to the American Revolution are often oversimplified, and discussion of them can lose the human element, as well as the complexities of the issues and effects they had on real people.
A key example is the quartering of British troops “among the people” in America. The details of this grievance with the British government are widely misunderstood – troops were not quartered in private homes, as is often incorrectly written; instead, the British Quartering Acts constituted an indirect form of taxation.
This book explains the complications and implications of quartering in a wonderfully readable manner, clarifying the perspectives of governments and citizens on both sides. It is a book about people, and how the laws affected them.
When Americans declared independence in 1776, they cited King George III "for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us." In Quarters, John Gilbert McCurdy explores the social and political history behind the charge, offering an authoritative account of the housing of British soldiers in America. Providing new interpretations and analysis of the Quartering Act of 1765, McCurdy sheds light on a misunderstood aspect of the American Revolution.
Quarters unearths the vivid debate in eighteenth-century America over the meaning of place. It asks why the previously uncontroversial act of accommodating soldiers in one's house became an unconstitutional act. In so…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
Many of my English ancestors came to New England during the so-called Great Migration of the 1630s. I also have Native American ancestors, and as I researched both groups I couldn’t escape the feeling that something important was missing from our contemporary understanding of the period. In the novel that became Will Poole’s Island, I was in a sense driven to recreate the age, or at least to complicate our received mythologies about it. A central theme of the book is the collision of two radically opposed worldviews that had in common a preoccupation with the visionary and the unseen; this is also a theme of the five narratives described below.
This novel, published in 2000 by the University Press of New England, has in my opinion never gained the readership it deserves. It’s a rich, funny, deeply humane captivity tale based on the true story of Nathan Blake, who was taken by Algonkian-speaking people from his home in Keene, New Hampshire, in 1746, and brought up to Canada, where he was held for three years as a slave. The novel weaves a defamiliarized but extremely plausible-feeling tapestry of early colonial America that complicates the stereotypes established by Cooper’s influential novel set in the same period, and Hebert’s main character, Caucus-Meteor—an elderly, multilingual Indian and the last survivor of his band—is by my lights one of the great characters in literature.
In 1746, Nathan Blake, the first frame house builder in Keene, New Hampshire, was abducted by Algonkians and held in Canada as a slave. Inspired by this dramatic slice of history, novelist Ernest Hebert has written a masterful new novel recreating those years of captivity.
Set in New England and Canada during the French and Indian Wars, The Old American is driven by its complex, vividly imagined title character, Caucus-Meteor. By turns shrewd and embittered, ambitious and despairing, inspired and tormented, he is the self-styled"king" of the remnants of the first native tribes that encountered the English. Displaced and ravaged…
I’ve always been fascinated by American history and have clear memories of celebrating America’s bicentennial as a child. I have twenty-two Revolutionary Patriots in my family history, and I am most proud of my 6x-great grandmother, Anna Asbury Stone, for her bravery and daring during the winter of 1778. I did extensive genealogical research to learn about her, her family, and her circumstances before writing Answering Liberty’s Call: Anna Stone’s Daring Ride to Valley Forge.
Bound is set in the years prior to the American Revolution, and highlights the difficulties faced by girls and women indentured servants. Alice and her family set out for America from England, but when her mother and brothers die during the voyage, Alice’s father decides he cannot keep her and sells her as an indentured servant upon reaching Boston. Alice should have had a middle-class upbringing, but instead, she becomes chattel. The scenes of abuse in this book are stark, but it helps to shed light on the sufferings of the disenfranchised and the helpless. Alice’s determination will inspire.
An indentured servant finds herself bound by law, society, and her own heart in this novel set in colonial Cape Cod from the author of acclaimed The Widow’s War.
Indentured servant Alice Cole barely remembers when she was not “bound”, first to the Morton family, then to their daughter Nabby—her companion since childhood—when she wed. But Nabby’s new marriage is not happy, and when Alice finds herself torn between her new master and her old friend, she runs away to Boston. There she meets a sympathetic widow named Lyddie Berry and her lawyer companion, Eben Freeman. Impulsively stowing away on…
I am an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut. I’ve spent most of my career thinking about the role children have played in American culture. Adults, past and present, often overlook the intelligence and resilience of children who have managed to change both their immediate circumstances, and the world around them. I seek out these children and do my best to honor their stories. I’ve written or edited four other books on race and childhood, and have a podcast on children in history.
The history of colonial and antebellum New York, in Harris’s hands, becomes a map of Black activism. This book moves beyond a history of slavery and abolition to offer a sweeping historical narrative of Black life in New York City,starting with the arrival of the first enslaved people in 1626 and culminating in the brutally violent draft riots of 1863. Harris works creatively with little-studied sources to chronicle how, even in the direst of circumstances, Black New Yorkers created vibrant communities. While Harris certainly depicts the obstacles that Black New Yorkers faced in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, she also showcases individual lives, marked by sharp ambition and myriad achievements. In this narrative, talented political operatives create national movements, argue with white abolitionists, and create institutions and traditions that influence racial politics to the present day.
"The black experience in the antebellum South has been thoroughly documented. But histories set in the North are few. In the Shadow of Slavery, then, is a big and ambitious book, one in which insights about race and class in New York City abound. Leslie Harris has masterfully brought more than two centuries of African American history back to life in this illuminating new work."-David Roediger, author of The Wages of Whiteness
In 1991 in lower Manhattan, a team of construction workers made an astonishing discovery. Just two blocks from City Hall, under twenty feet of asphalt, concrete, and rubble,…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I am a historian of early modern Europe, especially 16th- and 17th-century England, and my work pulls together threads from different historical disciplines, including political history, the history of science and technology, and environmental history. I am fascinated by the ways that human history is intimately linked with the environment, and I am most interested in how early modern European states and empires worked to understand, manage, and profit from the natural world, especially with respect to using and conserving natural resources such as water, wood, and wildlife. I have chosen books that explore these issues in innovative and exciting ways.
Mulry also takes Britain and its trans-Atlantic empire as her focus.
What most impressed me about the book was the exciting way she shows how individual health and personal character, public health, the natural environment, and statecraft were all strangely intertwined in the 17th century.
She argues that the many schemes for “improving” the landscape of both England and its overseas colonies were intended not only to yield a profit for investors, but also to foster public health and knit together the far-flung empire into a healthy body politic. I find myself recommending this book on a regular basis.
Examines the efforts to bring political order to the English empire through projects of environmental improvement
When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos. His government sought to assert control and affirm the King's sovereignty by touting his stewardship of both England's land and the improvement of his subjects' health. By initiating ambitious projects of environmental engineering, including fen and marshland drainage, forest rehabilitation, urban reconstruction, and garden transplantation schemes, agents of the English Restoration government aimed to transform both places…
