Books like The Hype About Hydrogen — picked by fans

I’m an energy researcher and energy industry strategist who has worked in academia, government, and the private sector for almost fifty years. I became fascinated with the importance of energy in planetary sustainability as an undergraduate engineering student in the 1970s and have been working in the field ever since. I’ve been fortunate to see how the energy system works from the standpoint of academic researchers, private companies, regulators, Wall Street, consumers, and government policymakers, and this gives me a broad perspective.

I’m an energy researcher and energy industry strategist who has worked in academia, government, and the private sector for almost fifty years. I became fascinated with the importance of energy in planetary sustainability as an undergraduate engineering student in the 1970s and have been working in the field ever since. I’ve been fortunate to see how the energy system works from the standpoint of academic researchers, private companies, regulators, Wall Street, consumers, and government policymakers, and this gives me a broad perspective.

I’m an energy researcher and energy industry strategist who has worked in academia, government, and the private sector for almost fifty years. I became fascinated with the importance of energy in planetary sustainability as an undergraduate engineering student in the 1970s and have been working in the field ever since. I’ve been fortunate to see how the energy system works from the standpoint of academic researchers, private companies, regulators, Wall Street, consumers, and government policymakers, and this gives me a broad perspective.

I’m an energy researcher and energy industry strategist who has worked in academia, government, and the private sector for almost fifty years. I became fascinated with the importance of energy in planetary sustainability as an undergraduate engineering student in the 1970s and have been working in the field ever since. I’ve been fortunate to see how the energy system works from the standpoint of academic researchers, private companies, regulators, Wall Street, consumers, and government policymakers, and this gives me a broad perspective.

I am an astrophysicist. I am a mother. I am an author. I am a cleaner of dishes, a cooker of meals. I am a daughter, a friend on the end of the phone, a reader of bedtime stories, and the one who hugs away the tears and kisses it better. But I am also just me. Emma. And the books I read are always to escape or understand the internal fight I have between identities and the feeling that pursuing one is failing all the others. Lift yourself above it all, breathe, and read yourself into a different world.

I grew up in London, and while I was born sometime after WWII, its devastation was still clear in my bombed suburb and in the stories from my family. My father and his brother served in the Royal Air Force, and an Austrian aunt had managed to escape the rest of her family's fate in Auschwitz. I've had five nonfiction books published when I decided to write a biography of my uncle David Lloyd, an RAF Spitfire pilot killed in 1942. Sadly, little information was available from his military records. All I had was a photograph of him in his plane, looking young and confident. I went on to write nine books set during WWII, and five during WWI.

I grew up in a small town, with a barn behind our house and an orchard across the street; nature was always part of my life. What made me more conscious of this was three canoe trips in the Quetico wilderness with my Boy Scout troop, where we saw loons, bears, and clear, sparkling lakes. I later became a political science professor, but I always hiked and camped, and eventually helped start an environmental studies program to share my passion with my students. I also learned about the growing threats we face from environmental destruction. These books helped shape my understanding of the problem and how to solve it. 

I'm an apocalyptic optimist—but I didn’t start that way. For over 25 years, I’ve studied climate action efforts and documented why governments and businesses are falling short. It’s become clear that the systemic changes we need will only come through civil society mobilizing for climate action. I’ve explored this in books, articles, and as a contributor to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment. I hope my writing inspires you to embrace your own apocalyptic optimism—not as despair, but as a hopeful, urgent call to action. It’s a powerful first step toward what I believe is still possible: Saving Ourselves.

I am an Antiguan-Barbudan writer. When I was a teen, there weren’t a lot of books from my world. So, I was excited when the Burt Award for teen/young adult Caribbean literature was announced. While that prize ran its course after five years, it left a library of great books in this genre, including my own Musical Youth which placed second in the inaugural year of the prize. I have since served as a judge of the Caribbean prize and mentor for the Africa-leg. I love that this series of books tap into different genres and styles in demonstrating the dynamism of modern Caribbean literature. For more on me, my books, and my take on books, visit my website.

I work in the venture capital (finance) space but have a long-time passion for and involvement with charity and philanthropy work, having founded several non-profits including most recently Lever Foundation which works to create a more humane and sustainable food system in Asia. I’m a big believer in and advocate for applying quantitative, analytical thinking and an outcome-focused mindset to efforts to make the world a better place. It’s something I think about every day, and it’s what I write about as well.