Here are 100 books that The Geography of Risk fans have personally recommended if you like
The Geography of Risk.
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Virtually my entire life has been spent within a few minutes or perhaps an hour from the shoreline and whether surfing, lifeguarding, beach combing, or traveling coasts around the planet, this narrow zone is one of constant change and energy that continues to inspire and intrigue me. My career as a professor has focused on coastal change and the challenges that shoreline processes pose to our coastally-focused civilization. Fifty-five years of teaching at the University of California Santa Cruz on the shoreline of Monterey Bay has led to 14 books and over 400 newspaper columns on Our Ocean Backyard focused on the coast and its changes, and there is always more to observe, study, and enjoy.
This book is one I didn’t want to put down and I don’t say this about most non-fiction books. Rosanna Xia, from her many years as a writer for the Los Angeles Times on coastal issues, has taken a topic that is of critical importance to all coastal cities and residents in California and beyond and through conversations with a wide variety of people in a handful of coastal communities makes this story engaging, interesting, and insightful.
The sea level is rising and we are in the way. We are now presented with massive challenges around the planet, and the coast of California and its diverse people and attitudes are a microcosm of this larger dilemma. Rosanna captures the diversity of opinions and perspectives in a very understandable and enlightening book that will be pertinent for many years to come.
Quite frankly, I loved this book and didn’t want it…
From a celebrated environmental journalist, the riveting exploration of sea level rise along the West Coast through human stories and ecological dramas.
2023 Golden Poppy Award Winner for Nonfiction, Chosen by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance
"Viscerally urgent, thoroughly reported, and compellingly written-a must-read for our uncertain times." -Ed Yong, author of An Immense World
"When do seawalls make sense? And when is it better to give in to the tides? [...] In California Against the Sea, Xia [...] writes about the difficult realities of trying to incorporate fairness into our tally of costs and benefits." -The New Yorker
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Virtually my entire life has been spent within a few minutes or perhaps an hour from the shoreline and whether surfing, lifeguarding, beach combing, or traveling coasts around the planet, this narrow zone is one of constant change and energy that continues to inspire and intrigue me. My career as a professor has focused on coastal change and the challenges that shoreline processes pose to our coastally-focused civilization. Fifty-five years of teaching at the University of California Santa Cruz on the shoreline of Monterey Bay has led to 14 books and over 400 newspaper columns on Our Ocean Backyard focused on the coast and its changes, and there is always more to observe, study, and enjoy.
I think Cory Dean, who was the long-time science editor for the New York Times, was perhaps the first to delve into the now well-documented and diverse impacts of the multiple human efforts to engineer and control our shorelines.
She visited dozens of threatened coastal communities and interviewed countless coastal geologists, engineers, elected officials, and citizens in order to better understand why decisions were made to modify shorelines in individual communities, more often than not, with predictable and damaging impacts on beaches.
In lively and engaging prose, she clearly explains each setting and location and why things went awry when Mother Nature always bats last.
Americans love to colonize their beaches. But when storms threaten, high-ticket beachfront construction invariably takes precedence over coastal environmental concerns-we rescue the buildings, not the beaches. As Cornelia Dean explains in Against the Tide, this pattern is leading to the rapid destruction of our coast. But her eloquent account also offers sound advice for salvaging the stretches of pristine American shore that remain. The story begins with the tale of the devastating hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas, in 1900-the deadliest natural disaster in American history, which killed some six thousand people. Misguided residents constructed a wall to prevent another tragedy,…
I am a coastal geologist with expertise in environmental issues related to coastal geomorphology, marine pollution, and coastal management. With a Ph.D. in Sea Sciences from the Universidad de Cádiz, I have contributed to the scientific community through my research, publication of over 100 scientific articles, and serving as the Editor of two international scientific journals—Ocean & Coastal Management and the Marine Pollution Bulletin. My research focuses on understanding and managing coastal hazards, marine pollution, and the impacts of human activities on coastal and marine ecosystems. Of particular importance in terms of beach safety was my recent co-authorship of the article Integrated Strategies for the Management and Mitigation of Beach Accidents.
This book provides an appealing overview of waves and currents with a folksy tone and scientific perspective. This book provides a quick and easy-to-understand guide to the top five physical beach hazards: rip currents, dumping waves (shorebreaks), shallow water diving, surging waves and big, storm-generated waves.
Rob has dedicated his life to making Australian beaches safer, including giving talks on the “Science of the Surf” to thousands of schoolchildren. Beaches are fun but dangerous places under certain conditions, and this book is for everyone who loves the surf.
How do waves break, and what makes good surf? What are dangerous rip currents, and how do you spot one? What should you do if you get caught in one?
Australia's best-known surf scientist, Rob "Dr. Rip" Brander, takes readers on a fascinating and entertaining journey to uncover how beaches form and behave, the science of waves and currents, and how beaches respond to storms and climate change. He explains where the sand we lay our towels on came from, how the tides that wash up new treasures each day work, why no two beaches are exactly the same, and…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
Three people changed my life: my grandfather, a self-taught naturalist, the cardiac surgeon I worked for to put myself through college, and a nuclear engineer I worked for at Los Alamos National Labs. Summering on an island in northern Ontario I was immersed in a world with minimal human impact. As an exploration geologist, I traveled the world and saw first-hand the impact humankind is having on our world. My books focus on man’s threats and dangers to our world—be they environmental, medical or the threat of weapons of mass destruction.
Threats to our world are not limited to those created by despots, terrorists, and weapons of mass destruction.
Climate change and associated global warming may be the biggest threat as sea levels rise as polar ice melts, threatening coastal environments. Increases in sea temperature fuel ever larger and more powerful storms and weather systems. Donlay captures this threat in Category Five, Hurricane Helena is growing into the greatest storm ever recorded.
Eco-watch races to save the scientists who are studying the storm. This amazing thriller combines climate change with intrigue, suspense with death threats. Can they defuse a storm great than Category Five?
When the only option is to maneuver a crippled plane into the calm eye of a category five hurricane
In the Atlantic Ocean, Hurricane Helena is gathering strength, becoming the most powerful storm in recorded history. As Helena bears down on Bermuda, Donovan Nash, along with other members of the scientific research organization Eco-Watch, are called to fly in and extract key government people who have been studying Helena.
For Donovan, the routine mission turns deadly when an attempt is made on the life of the lead scientist. A woman from the past, Dr. Lauren McKenna,…
I grew up in a confusing, chaotic household, and magic was always an escape for me. Books were my place to dream about other worlds and bigger choices. Stories of forgotten, invisible, or odd people who found their way to each other, found courage and talents they didn’t know they had, and then banded together to fight some larger foe even though they were scared. Was it possible that dragons and witches and gnomes were real and very clever at hiding in plain sight? What if I had hidden talents and courage and could draw on them with others just like me?
This one has no magic, but I threw it in because the setup is so close to reality with such a big twist that, for me, it fits.
The world changes completely for a family, and so suddenly, it’s as if they were transported somewhere else. The story left me thinking for a long time about identity and what happens when it is stripped away and we have to get up, rebuild, and survive anyway. Can we be kind? Will we still be honest? Are we brave? Can there still be any kind of joy?
'Tense, claustrophobic, and all too imaginable' Diane Chamberlain, author of The Last House on the Street
'A gripping, full-throttle page-turner' Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace
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An adrenaline-fuelled story of lives upended and privilege lost in a swiftly changing world.
Daphne Larsen-Hall has every reason to believe that her life as an artist in a luxury Miami house with her surgeon husband, Brantley, and their family, will carry on forever.
But Luna - the world's first Category 6 hurricane - changes everything. With Brantley missing in the aftermath of the massive storm, Daphne and their children find…
I am a lover of ghosts, historical murders, and all things spooky. I am also the author of eight YA novels, including two YA horror novels, Small Town Monsters and Hatchet Girls. Being half Puerto Rican, I try to lend my culture to my characters. Historically, the horror genre has been dominated by white male authors. And while I love their work, Stephen King is a master, I'm excited that women and POC writers are finally getting their stories told. What scares women is often very different from what scares men, same with people of color, and by releasing more diverse stories, like mine, we add ways to frighten new fans.
This YA Horror novel is technically the sequel to Cardinal’s smash hit Five Midnights, which was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, but I liked it even more than the original.
Category Five takes place in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, and it dives into the real-life struggle with real estate developers trying to gobble up cheap, devasted properties. It also exposes the ghostly history left on nearby Vieques Island after the last Cat 5 storm that hit way back in 1926.
The book features a mixture of spooky and historical with an endearing cast of found family that make it a quick, fun read.
Category Five is a new supernatural YA thriller from Ann Dávila Cardinal, set against the backdrop of a post-hurricane Puerto Rico.
After the hurricane, some see destruction and some smell blood.
The tiny island of Vieques, located just off the northeastern coast of the main island of Puerto Rico, is trying to recover after hurricane Maria, but the already battered island is now half empty. To make matters worse, as on the main island, developers have come in to buy up the land at a fraction of its worth, taking advantage of the island when it is down.
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I like to think I’m the smart female protagonist of my own life. Each of the women I’ve described in this book calls out to me in some way. They’re misunderstood or devalued by the people around them. They know more than they’re given credit for. I think most women feel that to some degree. I think its understood now that representation matters. We all want to see ourselves in the media we take in. I saw myself in these protagonists, or I saw a need that these books would fill in my life if I lived in their worlds.
I can’t stop thinking about this book. The setting is Florida in the near future, where climate change has reached a point where the ocean is reclaiming the state. The book spans the entire life of the protagonist, Wanda. Wanda broke my heart. She suffered so much loss, none of which was her own fault. But, smart and curious, she found a way, led primarily by an older woman who took her under her wing.
I felt for Wanda as she lost her family and friends, dealt with bullies, and lost her home. And I cheered her on when she found ways to survive. Wanda is the light: the message of the book, which could easily have been horribly depressing, was that love will find a way—life will find a way if you give it room to breathe.
Set in the near future, this hopeful story of survival and resilience follows Wanda—a luminous child born out of a devastating hurricane—as she navigates a rapidly changing world: A “symphony of beauty and heartbreak” (Associated Press).
A Good Morning America Book Club pick · #1 Indie Next pick · LibraryReads pick · Book of the Month Club selection · Marie Claire #ReadWithMC book club selection · 2022 NPR “Book We Love” · New York Times Editors’ Choice
Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state’s infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches…
My mother was the only female chemist in a Fortune 500 company for a good two decades before another one was hired. I saw from a front-row seat the misogyny she endured. The result of this experience was that I wrote a novel about a female doctor in 1894. I also ended up in a technical field that was only slightly populated by women, although women dominate it today. I saw the transition because I was involved in it. I think my acceptance in that field happened because of the efforts of the other women who went before me.
I really enjoyed this book because it plopped me right into the early 1900s when women began wandering into traditionally men’s fields like medicine. I like the delicate folding of the main character’s personal life with her Down Syndrome child and her struggles in her professional life because, face it, work is not everything in life.
This book captures the compromises a single mother has to make and compounds them by adding characters who refuse to believe she’s competent in medicine.
In a uniquely vivid story of women in medicine, found family, and conquering fear for readers of Kristin Hannah, Ellen Marie Wiseman, and Audrey Blake, an impoverished former doctor and her disabled son join a traveling medicine show and its family of strangers on a collision course with the deadliest natural disaster in American history – the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. From the acclaimed author of The Nurse's Secret and The Second Life of Mirielle West.
"Perfect on so many levels that I don't even know where to begin." —Addison Armstrong, Author of The War Librarian
I am passionate about the dissemination of economic ideas both inside and outside university spaces. In addition to classroom lectures at my university, I give a lot of public lectures on economics. Through these talks, I introduce the audience to the tradition of doing economics using a critical perspective. I have an MA and MPhil in Economics from the University of Hyderabad and a PhD in Economics from the University of Sydney.
This book on measurement in economics was published in 1951. Stone discusses the link between theory and empirics in this book.
I like this slim book of Stone’s because it shows the strengths and weakness of empirical exercises in economics. It also raises foundational questions regarding empirical constructs.
Books like this allow us to ask foundational questions regarding the links between theory and empirics in economics as well as theory and applications in statistics.
First published in 1951, and originally delivered as the Newmarch Lectures for 1948-9, this book examines the role of measurement in obtaining and applying economic knowledge. Esteemed economist Richard Stone, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, divides his topic into four sections: questions of fact and empirical constructs; the truth or falsity of a hypothesis; the estimation of parameters; and questions of prediction. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in economics and the development of the discipline.
I am a reader of primary texts. One can be dismayed by the number of followers’ easy reliance on secondary literature to create interpretations of their leader’s economic ideas about the sources of society’s well-being. Distortive alteration and the recycling of unfounded ideas about conflicting influential economists’ theories is actually counterproductive. Only scrutiny of an author’s work can reveal false assertions. I’m proposing four authors I’ve scrutinised to find out what they really thought about my main teaching interests: money and credit, and their impact on prices, and the manipulation of the volume of either/both to affect purchasing power. It has been astounding to learn what theory applications, distorting their intent, bear their name.
Hicks envisaged an economy in which individuals choose to offer labour for income to purchase products of their effort or to spend time in uncompensated leisure.
His is a theorical economy: individuals and firms interact to determine current and future supplies and demands. It establishes the laws governing the price system regulating exchange and production.
In this world of transparent, free movement of goods and resources without government, regulations, banks, and unions, there is no room for monopolies or capital accumulation.
Money as intermediary is simply a unit of account. Growth is the outcome of needs, efforts, and mutual cooperation.
Value and Capital, a jewel, is the core of current microeconomics, but Hicks’ economy, in which inflation and income disparities are non-issues, is not a capitalist but a market one; ironically present microeconomists conflate the two.
