As a former middle school language arts teacher, I’ve witnessed firsthand the struggles some students face trying to be accepted and the heartbreak they experience when they are not. Every child deserves to be seen and appreciated for who they are and not be excluded or ostracized due to factors over which they have little control. I write and promote picture books about friendship, acceptance, and inclusion because everyone deserves to be included…always.
This is a wonderful story whose main character has Down’s Syndrome, but it’s not a book about a child with Down’s Syndrome. The focus instead is on Adam’s kindness, his helpfulness, his positive attitude, and his community’s willingness to value him as a respected member. I absolutely love the sense of community inclusion found in this story.
A boy with Down syndrome lifts spirits all over town!
It’s the day after the big storm. Adam and his dog, Up, are finishing breakfast when the mayor appears on TV asking everyone to help with the cleanup. She says, “Now, it’s time to get to work. Up and at ’em!” When Adam hears the mayor tell him and Up to get to work, he’s on it! “We can help!” Adam says. And as everyone in the town is about to discover — they really can!
With kindness in his heart and a smile on his face, Adam shows readers…
I have always been interested in the world’s mysteries. This is why I studied theoretical physics. Ultimately, this scientific pathway led to a permanent position in the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. But archaeology is also fascinating, and I was lucky enough to decode some ancient symbols at one of the world’s most important archaeological sites, Göbekli Tepe. The resulting story combines archaeology, astronomy and geophysics to present a new synthesis for the origin of civilization. My academic background in science has helped me to provide compelling evidence and arguments for these ideas.
This is a great introduction to the science of the Younger Dryas impact. Published a year before the seminal paper of Firestone et al. (2007), it makes the case for a devastating cosmic event, probably a meteor or comet impact, circa 10850 BC.
The book combines science with historical accounts and mythology to arrive at this stunning conclusion. Although I think some of the evidence in the book is speculative and possibly wrong, I think their main arguments in 2006 have held up well to intense scrutiny by critics since then. I consider this book to be another essential read for the coherent catastrophist enthusiast.
Scientific proof validating the legends and myths of ancient floods, fires, and weather extremes
* Presents scientific evidence revealing the cause of the end of the last ice age and the cycles of geological events and species extinctions that followed
* Connects physical data to the dramatic earth changes recounted in oral traditions around the world
* Describes the impending danger from a continuing cycle of catastrophes and extinctions
There are a number of puzzling mysteries in the history of Earth that have yet to be satisfactorily explained by mainstream science: the extinction of the dinosaurs, the vanishing of ancient…
I have long been fascinated by history – and by the future. As a Boomer, born in 1949, I have surfed successive environmental, green, and sustainability waves. Since 1978, I have co-founded four businesses in the field, all of which still exist. I am now Chief Pollinator at Volans. I have served on some 80 boards and advisory boards and spoken at nearly 2000 major events worldwide. And I have authored or co-authored 20 books, including the million-selling Green Consumer Guide series from 1988. Science fiction has been a constant inspiration. The books I have picked are generally optimistic, in contrast to dystopias like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Finally, given the richness of this area of fiction, we can be sure that there are many many other green sci-fi shortlists out there waiting to be published, including ones featuring women like Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood.
Earth, published in 1990, had me dog-earing many, many pages. A sense of our responsibility to the planet is shot through the book. For me this novel was very much in the spirit of a near – but warped – future that I had so enjoyed early on in books like John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. When I wrote to Brunner to say that his dystopian view of the future struck me as likely, he replied that he was disappointed, having written it as a warning, to minimize the risk of the future being driven off the rails by over-population.
Earth, overall, is more optimistic. Another novel on related themes by Brin was The Postman, made into a film starring Kevin Costner. Again, I interviewed David early in 2021 for our new Green Swans Observatory—and a key theme was his inspiration by the Judaic concept of…
It's fifty years from tomorrow, and a black hole has accidentally fallen into the Earth's core. A team of scientists frantically searches for a way to prevent the mishap from causing harm, only to discover another black hole already feeding relentlessly at the core - one that could destroy the planet within two years.
In 2014, Alyssa Padgett convinced her husband Heath to take her to all 50 states for their honeymoon. Somehow he tricked her into doing it all in an RV. They’ve lived and traveled in an RV ever since. With her husband, Alyssa runs The RV Entrepreneur Podcast, a resource for anyone who wants to run a business while RVing.
This is one of the few novels I’ve read that perfectly depicts RV life! The main character Ellie ends up living in her car after a hurricane destroys her home. While she’s camping in the back of her car, she quickly becomes interested and maybe a tad jealous at all these people happily camping in their RVs where they have stoves and heaters and real beds.
This easy weekend read is short and sweet (and the first book in a series, if you get hooked). In addition to sharing Ellie’s transition into buying and living in her first RV, there are a few great insights for newbie RVers too. If nonfiction isn’t your thing, this is definitely the best fiction book on RV life that I’ve come across.
Ellie Dwyer, 61, is convinced bad luck comes in threes, and not just garden-variety, oh-well bad luck. How many people have to flee not one, but two natural disasters? And in between the wildfire and the hurricane, her husband of nearly forty years suddenly up and left her for no reason she could fathom, disappearing from her life without a clue to his whereabouts.
Determined to reinvent her life, Ellie sets out on a journey across the country. Along the way to nowhere in particular, she buys a camper, becomes friends…
In 1999, fresh out of Harvard, I moved to Zendik Farm—a neo-hippie cult with a radical take on sex and relationships. Since I left in 2004, I’ve been composting the experience into a source of fertility. I've explored not only what drew me to Zendik and kept me there but also how groups like Zendik feed on deficiencies in our cultural soil—and how common it is for us humans to get trapped inside stories. Even—especially—if we assume ourselves immune to cultism. That is, I’ve approached my cult experience with sincere curiosity. So have all the authors on this list. That’s why I love them.
In fictional Union Grove, post-collapse, it takes a cult—the New Faith Church—to sustain a village. Equipped with social cohesion, ecstatic optimism, and shared purpose, the New Faithers come through for their neighbors in surprising and admirable ways.
I love this book because it shows the bright side of cult life. The New Faithers remind me of myself and my fellow Zendiks at our best. For all our failings, we sure did know how to band together to get shit done.
In The Long Emergency celebrated social commentator James Howard Kunstler explored how the terminal decline of oil production, combined with climate change, had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business. In World Made by Hand, an astonishing work of speculative fiction, Kunstler brings to life what America might be, a few decades hence, after these catastrophes converge. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is nothing like they thought it would be. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely…
My research and writing in the field of emergency or disaster management has been focused on the concept of hazard mitigation. This means reducing the impact of disasters, the creation of hazard resilient and sustainable communities, and the application of scientific and technical expertise to the task. We all live in a world where it has become more important than ever to make intelligent decisions driven by a comprehension of the properties of the physical universe. It is also a world in which economic self-interest and political interests may impede that idealistic goal. I have a sense of urgency about reducing the efficacy of such impediments.
This classic book, published a quarter of a century ago, redefined the field of emergency management and has influenced my work and writing in this subject area for the past two decades.
Natural disasters are, in this landmark assessment, not events to be addressed in isolation. They are symptoms of broader problems. These broader problems require that emergency management be linked to broader concerns such as the management of natural resources, economic and social resilience, and public health and safety. This requires an orientation that emphasizes hazard mitigation to reduce the impact of disasters (natural and human-caused) and promotes the building of sustainable communities. This insight became the emphasis of the field in the decades that followed the publication of this book.
This book was certainly the most important influence on my work in the study of disaster management.
Disasters by Design provides an alternative and sustainable way to view, study, and manage hazards in the United States that would result in disaster-resilient communities, higher environmental quality, inter- and intragenerational equity, economic sustainability, and improved quality of life. This volume provides an overview of what is known about natural hazards, disasters, recovery, and mitigation, how research findings have been translated into policies and programs; and a sustainable hazard mitigation research agenda. Also provided is an examination of past disaster losses and hazards management over the past 20 years, including factors?demographic, climate, social?that influence loss. This volume summarizes and sets…
I have an idea. A conviction, let's call it, that humanity is not doomed. The Mad Max scenario where civilization collapses, thrusting us into an anarchic hellscape in which the living envy the dead, is totally unrealistic and not likely to happen. So let's imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario in which people come together to help each other, to save what knowledge they can, to build something new and useful. To learn the lessons from the destruction that came before. This is what I tried to imagine in my novel Bannerless, and this is why this topic interests me so much.
When you study the long arc of history you begin to suspect that apocalypses aren't just inevitable, they're common. And so is survival, which is a really heartening thought. Human beings are crazily adaptable, and our ability to come together in communities (ideally, when we're at our best, which granted isn't always and is hard to see sometimes) will aid our survival. Annalee Newitz tells us how this is has happened before, and how it can happen again.
A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in Science & Technology
In its 4.5 billion-year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way. Can we survive it? How? In this brilliantly speculative work of popular science, Annalee Newitz, editor of io9.com, explains that although global disaster is all but inevitable, our chances of long-term species survival are better than ever. Scatter, Adapt, and Remember explores…
Growing up, many of the female characters in the media I engaged with were thin stereotypes (and some still are). Slowly, culture shifted towards the “strong female character, which quickly became a stereotype of its own. As culture shifts again to more nuanced female characters, many of them are slapped with the label of “unlikeable.” The label usually means that the character isn’t a tired stereotype and is complex, multifaceted, and interesting. Also, nearly all the time, the same traits admired in a male character are despised in a female character (think of Alicent Hightower, whose moral complexity would certainly be celebrated in a man).
This book is told in first-person from the perspective of Dunleavy, a pretty judgmental young woman who is not happy to be partnered with the infamous Shintaro Tarish. She's stubborn, inexperienced, naive, a little full of herself, cold, overly logical, and has little to no emotional intelligence. She also takes everything in stride, has an incredible dry wit, and is genuinely caring.
She's the type of character who will make you feel so many emotions, because she's so real she leaps off the page. There were times when I audibly groaned because Dunleavy's actions were just so terribly frustrating. I was delighted by her and her slow-burn friendship with Shintaro, made so tantalizing because Dunleavy can be so terrible to him sometimes!
In a realm beset by natural disasters, only the magical abilities of the bonded Pairs—Source and Shield—make the land habitable and keep the citizenry safe. The ties that bind them are far beyond the relationships between lovers or kin—and last their entire lives…
Whether they like it or not.
Since she was a child, Dunleavy Mallorough has been nurturing her talents as a Shield, preparing for her day of bonding. Unfortunately, fate decrees Lee’s partner to be the legendary, handsome, and unbearably self-assured Lord Shintaro Karish. Sure, he cuts a fine figure with his aristocratic airs and undeniable courage. But…
Writing my eighth novel, The Testament of Jessie Lamb, I had to move the story into the future in order to explore the topics I was trying to understand. I think through writing: sometimes I feel it is only through writing that I really engage with the world. Work on Jessie Lamb entailed a lot of scientific and future research, and after that I read more and more future fiction, with an increasing appetite for the work of writers who are really interested in exploring where we are headed as a species, and how we might try to survive the damage we have inflicted on the earth.
Here’s another novel about ecological catastrophe, but with the addition of a violent and delusional female prophet, who predicts the very dates upon which disasters will occur. I had been meaning to read Jensen for years, but was finally reminded to by discovering that she is a fellow member of Extinction Rebellion.
I was completely gripped by The Rapture, which managed to be unpredictable right to the very end. For once, I honestly can’t say better than The Daily Mail: A gripping tale of love, death and religion, set in the not-too-distant future… deliciously apocalyptic and jammed full of ideas, this is storytelling at its rapturous best.
In a merciless summer of biblical heat and destructive winds, Gabrielle Fox's main concern is a personal one: to rebuild her career as a psychologist after a shattering car accident. But when she is assigned Bethany Krall, one of the most dangerous teenagers in the country, she begins to fear she has made a terrible mistake. Raised on a diet of evangelistic hellfire, Bethany is violent, delusional, cruelly intuitive and insistent that she can foresee natural disasters - a claim which Gabrielle interprets as a symptom of doomsday delusion. But when catastrophes begin to occur on the very dates Bethany…
I am a children’s book author who is awed by the ocean and the creatures that dwell in its depths. I love writing for kids because they’re unabashedly eager, enthusiastic, and curious! To write this book, I dove deep into researching information about the ocean. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. I kept thinking, kids will love these fascinating facts and they’ll want to learn more. The wonderful books on this list tell amazing tales, take kids on adventures, and turn dry facts into a deluge of fun. These nonfiction stories offer kids opportunities to become immersed in our awesome ocean!
I was delighted to discover this short, sweet, sciency book about the ocean.
Written in rhyme and framed by the reassuring phrase “the sea knows,” this book is ideal for the youngest readers. Many of the concepts and creatures presented are opposites. For example, “the sea knows huge,” one blue whale, is paired with “the sea knows small,” a multitude of tiny krill.
The watery world comes to life in bright, colorful illustrations that are cleverly composed to help kiddos understand the concepts introduced in the text. The back of the book is filled with facts about the plants and animals featured in the story.
Dive in and explore the wonders of the ocean and its inhabitants in this lyrical, fact-filled ode to the sea! This beautifully illustrated picture book features extensive nonfiction backmatter for further exploration.
We are young. The sea is old. The sea has secrets to unfold. The sea knows.
In this playful, rhyming celebration of the marine world, readers can explore all of the wondrous things the sea knows. It knows huge whales and small krill; it knows short crabs and tall giant kelp; it knows brightly colored starfish in shallow pools; and in the inky depths it knows the alluring…
