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Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta
Zalika Reid-Benta announces herself as an enormous voice for the coming decade (and one that is desperately needed). Not all must-read books are this enjoyable.
Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and Lake Success
Each story in Frying Plantain is achingly poignant, insightful, and funny; each a gem unto itself. Ms. Reid-Benta’s fully sympathetic protagonist, Kara Davis, is a girl who belongs to neither Canada nor Jamaica, despite the fact that both places are ‘home.’ Her family — loving, flawed, and wickedly at odds with one another — all demand her loyalty, and her loyal friends aren’t friends at all. As a collection, these stunning stories create a multi-faceted jewel of a book.
Binni Kirshenbaum, author of The Scenic Route and Rabbits for Food
Zalika Reid-Benta’s first book — by turns effortless, vivid, funny, sad, and genuinely like being there — is as shiny as they come. Her spot-on capture of youthful aspiration, folly, and how family members tend to understand one another only in fragments make these stories a real pleasure — full of recognition, humour, and keenly observed lives in the here and now. Frying Plantain, a window into the world of growing upward and onward inside and outside family ties, is an absolute gem.
Janice Galloway, author of Clara and All Made Up
Sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, Frying Plantain is written in the indelible ink of memory. Zalika Reid-Benta is a masterful storyteller with a light touch, a photographic recall, and a pitch-perfect ear for the ephemera we’d like to think of as youthful, but just can’t seem to shake. This is an unforgettable debut.
Paul Beatty, Booker Prize-Winning Author of The Sellout
Reid-Benta’s writing is clear, precise, and infused with emotional depth. The characters are complex and well developed — comforting in their familiarity and frustrating in their stubbornness. Reid-Benta masterfully uses Kara’s everyday life to highlight the intimate inner workings of her characters, their family dysfunction, and the juxtaposition of Canadian and Jamaican identities.
Quill & Quire
A coming of age tale that emerges through an artful layering of episodes ... Zalika Reid-Benta’s debut brings a tenderness and awkward humour to the portrayal of adolescence that can only be drawn from life.
Cameron Woodhead, The Age
Frying Plantain is a beautifully written and simply observed series of stories. Centred on a flawed, believable protagonist, rich with detail, and peopled by real characters. It paints a vivid picture of the experience of the second and third generation immigrants that could be just as true anywhere in the world.
Pile by the Bed
A very engaging read.
Kate Evans, ABC Radio National The Bookshelf
Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story and Lake Success
Each story in Frying Plantain is achingly poignant, insightful, and funny; each a gem unto itself. Ms. Reid-Benta’s fully sympathetic protagonist, Kara Davis, is a girl who belongs to neither Canada nor Jamaica, despite the fact that both places are ‘home.’ Her family — loving, flawed, and wickedly at odds with one another — all demand her loyalty, and her loyal friends aren’t friends at all. As a collection, these stunning stories create a multi-faceted jewel of a book.
Binni Kirshenbaum, author of The Scenic Route and Rabbits for Food
Zalika Reid-Benta’s first book — by turns effortless, vivid, funny, sad, and genuinely like being there — is as shiny as they come. Her spot-on capture of youthful aspiration, folly, and how family members tend to understand one another only in fragments make these stories a real pleasure — full of recognition, humour, and keenly observed lives in the here and now. Frying Plantain, a window into the world of growing upward and onward inside and outside family ties, is an absolute gem.
Janice Galloway, author of Clara and All Made Up
Sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, Frying Plantain is written in the indelible ink of memory. Zalika Reid-Benta is a masterful storyteller with a light touch, a photographic recall, and a pitch-perfect ear for the ephemera we’d like to think of as youthful, but just can’t seem to shake. This is an unforgettable debut.
Paul Beatty, Booker Prize-Winning Author of The Sellout
Reid-Benta’s writing is clear, precise, and infused with emotional depth. The characters are complex and well developed — comforting in their familiarity and frustrating in their stubbornness. Reid-Benta masterfully uses Kara’s everyday life to highlight the intimate inner workings of her characters, their family dysfunction, and the juxtaposition of Canadian and Jamaican identities.
Quill & Quire
A coming of age tale that emerges through an artful layering of episodes ... Zalika Reid-Benta’s debut brings a tenderness and awkward humour to the portrayal of adolescence that can only be drawn from life.
Cameron Woodhead, The Age
Frying Plantain is a beautifully written and simply observed series of stories. Centred on a flawed, believable protagonist, rich with detail, and peopled by real characters. It paints a vivid picture of the experience of the second and third generation immigrants that could be just as true anywhere in the world.
Pile by the Bed
A very engaging read.
Kate Evans, ABC Radio National The Bookshelf
Tiberius with a Telephone: The Life and Stories of William McMahon by Patrick Mullins
‘For God’s sake behave like a prime minister’, implored the journalist who had assisted William McMahon to attain that office. His faults were legion. Throughout his political career he boasted and intrigued, curried favour, and was habitually disloyal. He worked assiduously with little comprehension of his responsibilities, and was indecisive and prone to panic. Patrick Mullins’ engrossing, fine biography does much more than document all these liabilities: it explains how they enabled him to attain national leadership and left him unable to exercise it.
Stuart Macintyre
Mullins fills an enormous gap in our political history with extraordinary insight and clarity. He casts new light on our post-war politics. and rescues one of its most dominant figures from the throes of partisan caricature.
Lindsay Tanner, Author of Sideshow and Politics with Purpose
A welcome addition to prime ministerial biography … An engaging and informative read.
Troy Bramston, The Australian
This is the most detailed investigation and explanation of what happened … Completing a biography of this scope is an enormous undertaking, and Patrick Mullins does it with considerable skill … Mullins conveys the turmoil, the atmosphere of crisis, the bickering and the bloodletting that marked this extraordinary period of Australian political history.
David Solomon, Inside Story
Dr Mullins has become an expert on the topic.
Danielle Nohra, citynews.com.au
So why did Mullins, a young political historian, pen a 776-page biography of William McMahon? And why is this book about such an apparently unlikely and unlikeable subject already emerging as a classic of its genre, just weeks after release? To find out the reader should first go to the book. The pages are well written and authoritative. They add up to a precociously confident historian's distillation of material from a remarkable range of sources.
Australian Financial Review
[Patrick Mullins] has certainly engaged in wide-ranging and meticulous research on his subject.
Michael Sexton, The Australian
Tiberius with a Telephone is relentless in its quest to understand a man who seems out of his depth in Canberra and, at times, uncertain why he’s even there. Importantly, it shows when a government is bereft of real leadership and ideas, how quickly things can go wrong.
Jeff Maynard, Herald Sun
[Patrick Mullins] provides a detailed and, at times, sympathetic account of the difficult issues McMahon faced as he struggled to shape events. But he is brutal in his depiction of McMahon’s dishonesty, dithering, vanity, cunning and capacity for political self-harm … His biography is an engaging exposition of a neglected politician and his complex era.
Duncan Hughes, Sydney Morning Herald
This is, as others have remarked, biography at its best: diligently researched, with detail nowhere else examined, and a demonstration of fine judgement concerning the crucial interplay between personal disposition, role demands, and historical context.
James Walter, Australian Book Review
The book is a significant work – exhaustive and considered ... an engrossing read.
Nick Mattiske, Insights (Uniting Church in Australia)
A fascinating read.
John Atkin, Company Director
[An] extremely entertaining, intriguing biography.
Mark Thomas, The Canberra Times
Stuart Macintyre
Mullins fills an enormous gap in our political history with extraordinary insight and clarity. He casts new light on our post-war politics. and rescues one of its most dominant figures from the throes of partisan caricature.
Lindsay Tanner, Author of Sideshow and Politics with Purpose
A welcome addition to prime ministerial biography … An engaging and informative read.
Troy Bramston, The Australian
This is the most detailed investigation and explanation of what happened … Completing a biography of this scope is an enormous undertaking, and Patrick Mullins does it with considerable skill … Mullins conveys the turmoil, the atmosphere of crisis, the bickering and the bloodletting that marked this extraordinary period of Australian political history.
David Solomon, Inside Story
Dr Mullins has become an expert on the topic.
Danielle Nohra, citynews.com.au
So why did Mullins, a young political historian, pen a 776-page biography of William McMahon? And why is this book about such an apparently unlikely and unlikeable subject already emerging as a classic of its genre, just weeks after release? To find out the reader should first go to the book. The pages are well written and authoritative. They add up to a precociously confident historian's distillation of material from a remarkable range of sources.
Australian Financial Review
[Patrick Mullins] has certainly engaged in wide-ranging and meticulous research on his subject.
Michael Sexton, The Australian
Tiberius with a Telephone is relentless in its quest to understand a man who seems out of his depth in Canberra and, at times, uncertain why he’s even there. Importantly, it shows when a government is bereft of real leadership and ideas, how quickly things can go wrong.
Jeff Maynard, Herald Sun
[Patrick Mullins] provides a detailed and, at times, sympathetic account of the difficult issues McMahon faced as he struggled to shape events. But he is brutal in his depiction of McMahon’s dishonesty, dithering, vanity, cunning and capacity for political self-harm … His biography is an engaging exposition of a neglected politician and his complex era.
Duncan Hughes, Sydney Morning Herald
This is, as others have remarked, biography at its best: diligently researched, with detail nowhere else examined, and a demonstration of fine judgement concerning the crucial interplay between personal disposition, role demands, and historical context.
James Walter, Australian Book Review
The book is a significant work – exhaustive and considered ... an engrossing read.
Nick Mattiske, Insights (Uniting Church in Australia)
A fascinating read.
John Atkin, Company Director
[An] extremely entertaining, intriguing biography.
Mark Thomas, The Canberra Times
How to Eat: all your food and diet questions answered by Mark Bittman, David L. Katz
In an approachable Q&A format, award-winning New York Times columnist Bittman and Katz, the founding director of Yale University’s Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Centre, tell you everything you ever wanted to know about eating healthily.
Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
A sensible guide to health from two genial experts.
Kirkus
[The authors debunk myths and address diet trends (paleo, keto, fasting) and topics like consuming dairy, prioritising organic foods, and drinking alcohol.] Expect well-deserved demand for this very readable, reasonable food for thought.
Booklist
All major areas of nutrition science are addressed, from the evolution of human food consumption to understanding current studies … Debunking nearly all current diet trends, including keto and paleo diets, the authors also discredit the superfood phenomenon … the demand for this straightforward resource about the current state of nutrition should be high.
Anitra Gates, Library Journal
Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
A sensible guide to health from two genial experts.
Kirkus
[The authors debunk myths and address diet trends (paleo, keto, fasting) and topics like consuming dairy, prioritising organic foods, and drinking alcohol.] Expect well-deserved demand for this very readable, reasonable food for thought.
Booklist
All major areas of nutrition science are addressed, from the evolution of human food consumption to understanding current studies … Debunking nearly all current diet trends, including keto and paleo diets, the authors also discredit the superfood phenomenon … the demand for this straightforward resource about the current state of nutrition should be high.
Anitra Gates, Library Journal
The Wooleen Way: Renewing an Australian Resource by David Pollock
The astonishing story of reviving the oldest land on Earth. The Wooleen Way is a revelation.
Tim Flannery
Written in simple, accessible language devoid of cant or dogma, this is a work of bracing intellectual honesty. All Australians who take environmental issues seriously must read this book. 4.5 STARS
Chris Saliba, Books+Publishing
With passion, wisdom, and keen observation, David Pollock has conducted a master class of regenerative rangeland instruction, supported by a do-able plan. The Wooleen Way should be read and absorbed by every agricultural/environment minister in the country and by their departmental staffs, whilst the principles outlined should be taught in all our agricultural colleges.
Major General Michael Jeffery, AC, CVO, MC, former governor-general of Australia and former governor of Western Australia
David tells his story with detail, care, humour and an endearing vulnerability. This 360-page paperback is a personal story of a man with a deeply rural heart and love of the land who wants to see it return to its former glory ... It’s a great read for lovers of autobiographies or anyone who wants to understand rural Australia, and particularly vital for anyone interested in livestock production in semi arid country.
R.M. Williams Outback
Through retelling the struggle of his family amid droughts, financial ruin, depression, and death, David Pollock exposes the modern day realities of managing a remote outback station ... This is an urgent story of political irresponsibility, bureaucratic obstinacy, industrial monopolisation, and, above all, ecological illiteracy in a vast segment of the Australian continent.
Sunraysia Life
The Wooleen Way is an engaging, must-read for anyone managing land in this nation. It will both challenge and reassure all farmers.
Sarah Hudson, Weekly Times
Fiercely intelligent, hopeful and candid, this is an engaging and personal read that will appeal to pastoralists as well as anyone with a passing interest in the environment and the impact of humans and farmed animals on the Australian landscape.
Eliza Henry-Jones, Organic Gardener Magazine
Tim Flannery
Written in simple, accessible language devoid of cant or dogma, this is a work of bracing intellectual honesty. All Australians who take environmental issues seriously must read this book. 4.5 STARS
Chris Saliba, Books+Publishing
With passion, wisdom, and keen observation, David Pollock has conducted a master class of regenerative rangeland instruction, supported by a do-able plan. The Wooleen Way should be read and absorbed by every agricultural/environment minister in the country and by their departmental staffs, whilst the principles outlined should be taught in all our agricultural colleges.
Major General Michael Jeffery, AC, CVO, MC, former governor-general of Australia and former governor of Western Australia
David tells his story with detail, care, humour and an endearing vulnerability. This 360-page paperback is a personal story of a man with a deeply rural heart and love of the land who wants to see it return to its former glory ... It’s a great read for lovers of autobiographies or anyone who wants to understand rural Australia, and particularly vital for anyone interested in livestock production in semi arid country.
R.M. Williams Outback
Through retelling the struggle of his family amid droughts, financial ruin, depression, and death, David Pollock exposes the modern day realities of managing a remote outback station ... This is an urgent story of political irresponsibility, bureaucratic obstinacy, industrial monopolisation, and, above all, ecological illiteracy in a vast segment of the Australian continent.
Sunraysia Life
The Wooleen Way is an engaging, must-read for anyone managing land in this nation. It will both challenge and reassure all farmers.
Sarah Hudson, Weekly Times
Fiercely intelligent, hopeful and candid, this is an engaging and personal read that will appeal to pastoralists as well as anyone with a passing interest in the environment and the impact of humans and farmed animals on the Australian landscape.
Eliza Henry-Jones, Organic Gardener Magazine
The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop It by Bronwyn Fryer, Jonathan D. Quick
Infectious disease outbreaks rival natural disasters and wars in their capacity to endanger human health, cripple economies and disrupt societies. The End of Epidemics shows us that by learning from the past we can build a world more resilient to infectious disease. But we must act quickly.’
Dr. Jeremy Farrar, Director, Welcome Trust
A down to earth account of what we know about epidemics, packaged wisely in 7 basic recommendations for action. The End of Epidemics proposes a new marriage of stakeholders: patients, communities, industry, doctors, political leaders, NGOs and philanthropies. Must read!
Dr. Joanne Liu, International President, MSF (Doctors without Borders)
Dr. Quick makes a compelling case for the public and private sector to elevate their work on preparation, response and rehabilitation around epidemics. The End of Epidemics makes the case from a social and an economic perspective that we have a collective responsibility to take action now.
Paul Polman, Chief Executive Officer, Unilever
The End of Epidemics presents actions, insights and a compelling tale of how individuals — whether citizens or leaders — can stand together with science and innovation to slow or stop the ever-present risk of disease outbreaks and epidemics. His message: the power of Seven, power of one and the power of many.
Dr. Heidi Larsen, Director, Vaccine Confidence Project
Rich in stories, The End of Epidemics is a powerful wake up call to get serious about epidemic threats. Quick offers down to earth solutions to prevent small and mega pandemics, a hundred years after the catastrophic 1918 Spanish flu.
Professor Peter Piot, Director, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
The End of Epidemics presents the challenge represented by global epidemiological risks and offers a convincing set of prescriptions to address them. It is a captivating book that combines the best public health evidence with compelling real-life stories.
Dr. Julio Frenk, President, University of Miami; Former Minister of Health, Mexico; and Former Dean, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Quick is an internationally recognised leader in global heath — his focus on innovation and new technologies is vital to pandemic threat prevention and preparedness to save lives around the globe.
Dr. Rajiv Shah, President, Rockefeller Foundation
Jonathan Quick offers a compelling and intensely readable plan to prevent worldwide infectious outbreaks. The End of Epidemics is essential reading for those who might be affected by a future pandemic — that is, just about everyone.
Sandeep Jauhar, Bestselling Author of Intern and Doctored
Dr. Jonathan Quick has written an insightful, accessible and personal history of modern epidemics, including such killers as smallpox and Ebola, and their dramatic impact on our lives and world. More importantly, Dr. Quick is not merely wringing his hands about the infectious catastrophes that are surely facing us, but focuses on the important actions needed to prevent social, economic and health consequences of inattention. Governments, international institutions, the private sector, and civil society had better take heed: prepare and plan now — or pay the price, in dollars and lives, tomorrow.
Rear Admiral Kenneth Bernard, Former Senior Official for Biodefense and Health Security Under President G.W. Bush and President Clinton
A well-documented and gripping account of the peril posed by pandemics. Dr. Quick, a global health leader from the front lines of the AIDS and Ebola, weaves rich historical facts and decades of personal experience to ring the alarm over the pandemic threat.
Dr. Ariel Pablos-Mendez, Former Head of Global Health, US Agency for International Development
Once in a while, we get a state-of-the-art synthesis of the complex problem of epidemics. Once in a very great while, such a summary is informed by deep experience battling them and by both passion and pragmatism. Only rarely — and this is the case in Quick’s The End of Epidemics
— is such an informed synthesis as readable as it is informed and as humane as it is pragmatic. The result is inspiring.
Paul Farmer, MD, Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Partners in Health
Sobering reading for public health officials and infectious disease students and perhaps inspiration for would-be activists to get busy. For general readers: get your flu shot.
Kirkus Reviews
Informative ... Without excess alarmism, Quick and Fryer show that such factors as climate change, terrorism, and the global food system put the next pandemic just around the corner.
Publishers Weekly
[S]even ways of preventing an infectious disease from reaching its pandemic potential … What makes [The End of Epidemics] a good, highly readable primer are its convincing examples and vivid human stories
The Economist
Dr. Quick's urgent message makes one hope that this book will reach a huge audience and that its exhortations will be acted on everywhere.
The Wall Street Journal
Pragmatic, insightful and research-rich, this is a key volume for the policymaker's shelf.
Nature
For readers interested in their own well-being and public health as well as ways to advocate for issues of great concern and urgency.
Library Journal
Quick offers a humane, readable, coherent analysis for would-be health leaders and disease responders, organised simultaneously as a handy reference tool for crisis response, and an outbreak explainer that in parts, thanks to assisting science writer Bronwyn Fryer, sizzles.
The Lancet
Dr Quick has written a fascinating book. Following decades working in some of the world’s most epidemic-prone countries, he argues for scientific and public health developments that can save humanity from deadly micro-organisms.
Dr David Heymann, Professor, Infectious Disease Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
This detailed book not only breaks down the science behind killer viruses, but tells the stories of medical pioneers whose tireless work has prevented debilitating epidemics, and could even help put an end to them forever.
GQ Australia
The End of Epidemics offers hope as Quick tells the stories of the heroes, past and present, who’ve succeeded in their fights to stop the spread of illness and death. The explains the science and the politics of epidemics and shows exactly how we can prevent, and end, epidemics in the future.
The News – Westport
In The End of Epidemics, Quick and co-author Bronwyn Fryer spell out the seven biggest things we need to stop those outbreaks becoming epidemics. It is an impressive wish list.
New Scientist
Dr. Jeremy Farrar, Director, Welcome Trust
A down to earth account of what we know about epidemics, packaged wisely in 7 basic recommendations for action. The End of Epidemics proposes a new marriage of stakeholders: patients, communities, industry, doctors, political leaders, NGOs and philanthropies. Must read!
Dr. Joanne Liu, International President, MSF (Doctors without Borders)
Dr. Quick makes a compelling case for the public and private sector to elevate their work on preparation, response and rehabilitation around epidemics. The End of Epidemics makes the case from a social and an economic perspective that we have a collective responsibility to take action now.
Paul Polman, Chief Executive Officer, Unilever
The End of Epidemics presents actions, insights and a compelling tale of how individuals — whether citizens or leaders — can stand together with science and innovation to slow or stop the ever-present risk of disease outbreaks and epidemics. His message: the power of Seven, power of one and the power of many.
Dr. Heidi Larsen, Director, Vaccine Confidence Project
Rich in stories, The End of Epidemics is a powerful wake up call to get serious about epidemic threats. Quick offers down to earth solutions to prevent small and mega pandemics, a hundred years after the catastrophic 1918 Spanish flu.
Professor Peter Piot, Director, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
The End of Epidemics presents the challenge represented by global epidemiological risks and offers a convincing set of prescriptions to address them. It is a captivating book that combines the best public health evidence with compelling real-life stories.
Dr. Julio Frenk, President, University of Miami; Former Minister of Health, Mexico; and Former Dean, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Quick is an internationally recognised leader in global heath — his focus on innovation and new technologies is vital to pandemic threat prevention and preparedness to save lives around the globe.
Dr. Rajiv Shah, President, Rockefeller Foundation
Jonathan Quick offers a compelling and intensely readable plan to prevent worldwide infectious outbreaks. The End of Epidemics is essential reading for those who might be affected by a future pandemic — that is, just about everyone.
Sandeep Jauhar, Bestselling Author of Intern and Doctored
Dr. Jonathan Quick has written an insightful, accessible and personal history of modern epidemics, including such killers as smallpox and Ebola, and their dramatic impact on our lives and world. More importantly, Dr. Quick is not merely wringing his hands about the infectious catastrophes that are surely facing us, but focuses on the important actions needed to prevent social, economic and health consequences of inattention. Governments, international institutions, the private sector, and civil society had better take heed: prepare and plan now — or pay the price, in dollars and lives, tomorrow.
Rear Admiral Kenneth Bernard, Former Senior Official for Biodefense and Health Security Under President G.W. Bush and President Clinton
A well-documented and gripping account of the peril posed by pandemics. Dr. Quick, a global health leader from the front lines of the AIDS and Ebola, weaves rich historical facts and decades of personal experience to ring the alarm over the pandemic threat.
Dr. Ariel Pablos-Mendez, Former Head of Global Health, US Agency for International Development
Once in a while, we get a state-of-the-art synthesis of the complex problem of epidemics. Once in a very great while, such a summary is informed by deep experience battling them and by both passion and pragmatism. Only rarely — and this is the case in Quick’s The End of Epidemics
— is such an informed synthesis as readable as it is informed and as humane as it is pragmatic. The result is inspiring.
Paul Farmer, MD, Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Partners in Health
Sobering reading for public health officials and infectious disease students and perhaps inspiration for would-be activists to get busy. For general readers: get your flu shot.
Kirkus Reviews
Informative ... Without excess alarmism, Quick and Fryer show that such factors as climate change, terrorism, and the global food system put the next pandemic just around the corner.
Publishers Weekly
[S]even ways of preventing an infectious disease from reaching its pandemic potential … What makes [The End of Epidemics] a good, highly readable primer are its convincing examples and vivid human stories
The Economist
Dr. Quick's urgent message makes one hope that this book will reach a huge audience and that its exhortations will be acted on everywhere.
The Wall Street Journal
Pragmatic, insightful and research-rich, this is a key volume for the policymaker's shelf.
Nature
For readers interested in their own well-being and public health as well as ways to advocate for issues of great concern and urgency.
Library Journal
Quick offers a humane, readable, coherent analysis for would-be health leaders and disease responders, organised simultaneously as a handy reference tool for crisis response, and an outbreak explainer that in parts, thanks to assisting science writer Bronwyn Fryer, sizzles.
The Lancet
Dr Quick has written a fascinating book. Following decades working in some of the world’s most epidemic-prone countries, he argues for scientific and public health developments that can save humanity from deadly micro-organisms.
Dr David Heymann, Professor, Infectious Disease Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
This detailed book not only breaks down the science behind killer viruses, but tells the stories of medical pioneers whose tireless work has prevented debilitating epidemics, and could even help put an end to them forever.
GQ Australia
The End of Epidemics offers hope as Quick tells the stories of the heroes, past and present, who’ve succeeded in their fights to stop the spread of illness and death. The explains the science and the politics of epidemics and shows exactly how we can prevent, and end, epidemics in the future.
The News – Westport
In The End of Epidemics, Quick and co-author Bronwyn Fryer spell out the seven biggest things we need to stop those outbreaks becoming epidemics. It is an impressive wish list.
New Scientist
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
Bryan Stevenson is America’s young Nelson Mandela — a brilliant lawyer fighting with courage and conviction to guarantee justice for all.
Desmond Tutu, Novel Peace Laureate
From the frontlines of social justice comes one of the most urgent voices of our era. Bryan Stevenson is a real-life, modern-day Atticus Finch who, through his work in redeeming innocent people condemned to death, has sought to redeem the country itself. This is a book of great power and courage. It is inspiring and suspenseful. A revelation.
Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns
Bryan Stevenson is one of my personal heroes, perhaps the most inspiring and influential crusader for justice alive today, and Just Mercy is extraordinary. The stories told within these pages hold the potential to transform what we think we mean when we talk about justice.
Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
This is so important. Stevenson explains how deep-rooted racism is, while giving hope that it doesn’t have to exist.
Gloria Steinem
[The] American criminal justice system has become an instrument of evil. Bryan Stevenson has laboured long and hard, and with great skill and temperate passion, to set things right. Words such as important and compelling may have lost their force through overuse, but reading this book will restore their meaning, along with one's hopes for humanity.
Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains
Just Mercy is as deeply moving, poignant and powerful a book as has been, and maybe ever can be, written about the death penalty, and the failures of the administration of criminal justice … [It] will make you gasp at the inhumanity of humankind.
Raymond Bonner, Financial Times
Powerful … This book will shock, anger and inspire you.
Sunday Independent (Ireland)
Unfairness in the justice system is a major theme of our age … This book brings new life to the story by placing it in two affecting contexts: Stevenson’s life work and the deep strain of racial injustice in American life … You don't have to read too long to start cheering for this man. Against tremendous odds, Stevenson has worked to free scores of people from wrongful or excessive punishment, arguing five times before the Supreme Court … The book extols not his nobility, but that of the cause, and reads like a call to action for all that remains to be done … The message of the book, hammered home by dramatic examples of one man's refusal to sit quietly and countenance horror, is that evil can be overcome, a difference can be made. Just Mercy will make you upset and it will make you hopeful … Bryan Stevenson has been angry about [the criminal justice system] for years, and we are all the better for it.
New York Times
Inspiring … A work of style, substance and clarity … Stevenson is not only a great lawyer, he's also a gifted writer and storyteller. His memoir should find an avid audience among players in the legal system — jurists, prosecutors, defense lawyers, legislators, academics, journalists — and especially anyone contemplating a career in criminal justice.
Rob Warden, Washington Post
After the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., I wrote a couple of columns entitled When Whites Just Don’t Get It. The reaction to those columns — sometimes bewildered, resentful or unprintable — suggests to me that many whites in America don’t understand the depths of racial inequity lingering in this country. This inequity is embedded in our law enforcement and criminal justice system, and that is why Bryan Stevenson may, indeed, be America's Mandela … Stevenson, 54, grew up in a poor black neighborhood in Delaware and ended up at Harvard Law School. He started the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Ala., to challenge bias and represent the voiceless. It's a tale he recounts in a searing, moving and infuriating memoir that is scheduled to be published later this month, Just Mercy.
Nick Kristof, New York Times
Stevenson's contributions to social justice have been remarkable. But his efforts, on top of his continuing legal practice, to provide this inside glimpse of the criminal justice system are priceless.
The Seattle Times
Not since Atticus Finch has a fearless and committed lawyer made such a difference in the American South. Though larger than life, Atticus exists only in fiction. Bryan Stevenson, however, is very much alive and doing God’s work fighting for the poor, the oppressed, the voiceless, the vulnerable, the outcast, and those with no hope. Just Mercy is his inspiring and powerful story.
John Grisham
A distinguished NYU law professor and MacArthur grant recipient offers the compelling story of the legal practice he founded to protect the rights of people on the margins of American society ... Emotionally profound, necessary reading. STARRED REVIEW
Kirkus Reviews, (Kirkus Prize Finalist
Stevenson reveals how much of a difference believing in someone and fighting their cause can make. An incredible story … may help fuel the fire on your own journey.
Wellbeing
Just Mercy is every bit as moving as To Kill a Mockingbird, and in some ways more so … [It] demonstrates, as powerfully as any book on criminal justice that I’ve ever read, the extent to which brutality, unfairness, and racial bias continue to infect criminal law in the United States. But at the same time that [Bryan] Stevenson tells an utterly damning story of deep-seated and widespread injustice, he also recounts instances of human compassion, understanding, mercy, and justice that offer hope ... Just Mercy is a remarkable amalgam, at once a searing indictment of American criminal justice and a stirring testament to the salvation that fighting for the vulnerable sometimes yields.
David Cole, The New York Review of Books
A passionate account of the ways our nation thwarts justice and inhumanely punishes the poor and disadvantaged STARRED REVIEW
Vanessa Bush, Booklist
This powerful book is a damning indictment of the US ‘justice’ system, which has the world’s highest rate of incarceration … A gifted narrator as well as a great lawyer, from his long dedication to helping the poor to achieve justice and mercy, he has learned that “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
Brian Maye, The Irish Times
[T]he author’s experience with the flaws in the American justice system add extra gravity to a deeply disturbing and oft-overlooked topic.
Publishers Weekly
Just Mercy presents a scathing exposé of the inequalities, racial bias and discrimination that has characterised the US justice system ... A profoundly important work.
Natalie Platten, Readings
Stevenson’s revelatory and thought-provoking memoir, Just Mercy, is a read that alters one’s empathy metre and forever sits deep within the psyche.
Jessica Bailey, Grazia
A confronting look at the corrupt and prejudiced trappings of the current criminal justice system in the United States and a moving window into the lives of those persecuted by it.
Citizens of the World
Desmond Tutu, Novel Peace Laureate
From the frontlines of social justice comes one of the most urgent voices of our era. Bryan Stevenson is a real-life, modern-day Atticus Finch who, through his work in redeeming innocent people condemned to death, has sought to redeem the country itself. This is a book of great power and courage. It is inspiring and suspenseful. A revelation.
Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns
Bryan Stevenson is one of my personal heroes, perhaps the most inspiring and influential crusader for justice alive today, and Just Mercy is extraordinary. The stories told within these pages hold the potential to transform what we think we mean when we talk about justice.
Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
This is so important. Stevenson explains how deep-rooted racism is, while giving hope that it doesn’t have to exist.
Gloria Steinem
[The] American criminal justice system has become an instrument of evil. Bryan Stevenson has laboured long and hard, and with great skill and temperate passion, to set things right. Words such as important and compelling may have lost their force through overuse, but reading this book will restore their meaning, along with one's hopes for humanity.
Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains
Just Mercy is as deeply moving, poignant and powerful a book as has been, and maybe ever can be, written about the death penalty, and the failures of the administration of criminal justice … [It] will make you gasp at the inhumanity of humankind.
Raymond Bonner, Financial Times
Powerful … This book will shock, anger and inspire you.
Sunday Independent (Ireland)
Unfairness in the justice system is a major theme of our age … This book brings new life to the story by placing it in two affecting contexts: Stevenson’s life work and the deep strain of racial injustice in American life … You don't have to read too long to start cheering for this man. Against tremendous odds, Stevenson has worked to free scores of people from wrongful or excessive punishment, arguing five times before the Supreme Court … The book extols not his nobility, but that of the cause, and reads like a call to action for all that remains to be done … The message of the book, hammered home by dramatic examples of one man's refusal to sit quietly and countenance horror, is that evil can be overcome, a difference can be made. Just Mercy will make you upset and it will make you hopeful … Bryan Stevenson has been angry about [the criminal justice system] for years, and we are all the better for it.
New York Times
Inspiring … A work of style, substance and clarity … Stevenson is not only a great lawyer, he's also a gifted writer and storyteller. His memoir should find an avid audience among players in the legal system — jurists, prosecutors, defense lawyers, legislators, academics, journalists — and especially anyone contemplating a career in criminal justice.
Rob Warden, Washington Post
After the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., I wrote a couple of columns entitled When Whites Just Don’t Get It. The reaction to those columns — sometimes bewildered, resentful or unprintable — suggests to me that many whites in America don’t understand the depths of racial inequity lingering in this country. This inequity is embedded in our law enforcement and criminal justice system, and that is why Bryan Stevenson may, indeed, be America's Mandela … Stevenson, 54, grew up in a poor black neighborhood in Delaware and ended up at Harvard Law School. He started the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Ala., to challenge bias and represent the voiceless. It's a tale he recounts in a searing, moving and infuriating memoir that is scheduled to be published later this month, Just Mercy.
Nick Kristof, New York Times
Stevenson's contributions to social justice have been remarkable. But his efforts, on top of his continuing legal practice, to provide this inside glimpse of the criminal justice system are priceless.
The Seattle Times
Not since Atticus Finch has a fearless and committed lawyer made such a difference in the American South. Though larger than life, Atticus exists only in fiction. Bryan Stevenson, however, is very much alive and doing God’s work fighting for the poor, the oppressed, the voiceless, the vulnerable, the outcast, and those with no hope. Just Mercy is his inspiring and powerful story.
John Grisham
A distinguished NYU law professor and MacArthur grant recipient offers the compelling story of the legal practice he founded to protect the rights of people on the margins of American society ... Emotionally profound, necessary reading. STARRED REVIEW
Kirkus Reviews, (Kirkus Prize Finalist
Stevenson reveals how much of a difference believing in someone and fighting their cause can make. An incredible story … may help fuel the fire on your own journey.
Wellbeing
Just Mercy is every bit as moving as To Kill a Mockingbird, and in some ways more so … [It] demonstrates, as powerfully as any book on criminal justice that I’ve ever read, the extent to which brutality, unfairness, and racial bias continue to infect criminal law in the United States. But at the same time that [Bryan] Stevenson tells an utterly damning story of deep-seated and widespread injustice, he also recounts instances of human compassion, understanding, mercy, and justice that offer hope ... Just Mercy is a remarkable amalgam, at once a searing indictment of American criminal justice and a stirring testament to the salvation that fighting for the vulnerable sometimes yields.
David Cole, The New York Review of Books
A passionate account of the ways our nation thwarts justice and inhumanely punishes the poor and disadvantaged STARRED REVIEW
Vanessa Bush, Booklist
This powerful book is a damning indictment of the US ‘justice’ system, which has the world’s highest rate of incarceration … A gifted narrator as well as a great lawyer, from his long dedication to helping the poor to achieve justice and mercy, he has learned that “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
Brian Maye, The Irish Times
[T]he author’s experience with the flaws in the American justice system add extra gravity to a deeply disturbing and oft-overlooked topic.
Publishers Weekly
Just Mercy presents a scathing exposé of the inequalities, racial bias and discrimination that has characterised the US justice system ... A profoundly important work.
Natalie Platten, Readings
Stevenson’s revelatory and thought-provoking memoir, Just Mercy, is a read that alters one’s empathy metre and forever sits deep within the psyche.
Jessica Bailey, Grazia
A confronting look at the corrupt and prejudiced trappings of the current criminal justice system in the United States and a moving window into the lives of those persecuted by it.
Citizens of the World
Pills, Powder, and Smoke: Inside the Bloody War on Drugs by Antony Loewenstein
Loewenstein’s book is meticulous and forensic, and also impassioned and urgent. What stands out is the clarity of his thinking and the rigour of his arguments. He has an historian’s grasp of the big picture and a storyteller's skill for getting us to walk in the other's shoes. The vast scope of his thinking, travel and research is evident on every page, as is his clear-headed compassion. This book is vital and I couldn’t put it down.
Christos Tsiolkas
Many people assume that as the war on drugs has failed and because a few countries have liberated cannabis as a recreational drug as well as a medicine, the “drug problem” is solved. This new book powerfully demolishes any such complacency that might have developed in the west. Drug wars represent a major, ongoing world-wide disaster. This book is a must-read for anyone pursuing a rational policy debate about drugs.
Professor David Nutt, Imperial College, London
Antony Loewenstein is an amazing journalist and this is an amazing book. Anyone who cares about the war on drugs - one of the biggest catastrophes in the world - should read this superb book right away.
Johann Hari, author of Lost Connections and Chasing the Scream
In this vivid, partisan piece of reportage, Australian journalist Loewenstein (Disaster Capitalism) depicts the catastrophic human consequences of the U.S.-led war on drugs and advocates for the legalisation of all illicit substances. Loewenstein argues that America’s prohibitionist policy serves not to counter abuse or impede trafficking, but rather to create corrupt “narco states” that are complicit with the federal government’s foreign policy goals ... Readers inclined to take a skeptical view of the drug war ... will welcome Loewenstein’s advocacy.
Publishers Weekly
A critique of the war on drugs, which, by the author’s account, is mostly a war on the poor and dispossessed ... The author examines several fronts in a war fought by Western governments, especially the U.S., on harder drugs that ‘are consumed nightly in such major cities as London, Sydney, New York, and Paris’ ... A sometimes overwrought but pressing survey calling into question a war that would seem to benefit only its combatants.
Kirkus Review
Pills, Powder, and Smoke provides vital coverage of a war that may never be won, but that desperately demands out attention.
Kylie Maslen, Kill Your Darlings
He brings humanity and an even hand to his journalism, attempting to draw out multiple perspectives and asking questions from all angles but doing so with intimacy and palpable emotion ... Loewenstein believes in a moral drug policy, in ethical drug-taking and in fair-trade drugs, and makes no bones about wanting to change the conversation.
Louise Swinn, The Saturday Paper
A great read that cements my view that the war on drugs will never be won.
Wendy Squires, The Age
Thought-provoking.
The Telegraph
Loewenstein gives a thorough and convincing picture of an utterly failed policy.
Will Self, The Observer
A forensic look at the war on drugs.
Take 5 Magazine
Christos Tsiolkas
Many people assume that as the war on drugs has failed and because a few countries have liberated cannabis as a recreational drug as well as a medicine, the “drug problem” is solved. This new book powerfully demolishes any such complacency that might have developed in the west. Drug wars represent a major, ongoing world-wide disaster. This book is a must-read for anyone pursuing a rational policy debate about drugs.
Professor David Nutt, Imperial College, London
Antony Loewenstein is an amazing journalist and this is an amazing book. Anyone who cares about the war on drugs - one of the biggest catastrophes in the world - should read this superb book right away.
Johann Hari, author of Lost Connections and Chasing the Scream
In this vivid, partisan piece of reportage, Australian journalist Loewenstein (Disaster Capitalism) depicts the catastrophic human consequences of the U.S.-led war on drugs and advocates for the legalisation of all illicit substances. Loewenstein argues that America’s prohibitionist policy serves not to counter abuse or impede trafficking, but rather to create corrupt “narco states” that are complicit with the federal government’s foreign policy goals ... Readers inclined to take a skeptical view of the drug war ... will welcome Loewenstein’s advocacy.
Publishers Weekly
A critique of the war on drugs, which, by the author’s account, is mostly a war on the poor and dispossessed ... The author examines several fronts in a war fought by Western governments, especially the U.S., on harder drugs that ‘are consumed nightly in such major cities as London, Sydney, New York, and Paris’ ... A sometimes overwrought but pressing survey calling into question a war that would seem to benefit only its combatants.
Kirkus Review
Pills, Powder, and Smoke provides vital coverage of a war that may never be won, but that desperately demands out attention.
Kylie Maslen, Kill Your Darlings
He brings humanity and an even hand to his journalism, attempting to draw out multiple perspectives and asking questions from all angles but doing so with intimacy and palpable emotion ... Loewenstein believes in a moral drug policy, in ethical drug-taking and in fair-trade drugs, and makes no bones about wanting to change the conversation.
Louise Swinn, The Saturday Paper
A great read that cements my view that the war on drugs will never be won.
Wendy Squires, The Age
Thought-provoking.
The Telegraph
Loewenstein gives a thorough and convincing picture of an utterly failed policy.
Will Self, The Observer
A forensic look at the war on drugs.
Take 5 Magazine
Waters of the World: the story of the scientists who unravelled the mysteries of our seas, glaciers, and atmosphere and made the planet whole by Sarah Dry
Waters of the World sparkles with lyricism and wit. Dry is a gifted storyteller, and her research into the pre-history of Earth system science has turned up gripping tales of risk, adventure, defiance, and discovery. A unique and important book.
Deborah R. Coen, author of Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale
An account of the two-hundred-year effort to understand the world’s climate system, Waters of the World is not only timely but also one of the most beautifully written books on science that I have seen in a long time. It is one thing to communicate this complex and important topic lucidly, but quite another to make the material seductive, poetic, enthralling. I was left wanting to read John Tyndall’s writings on ice, to hear the epic creak of Alpine glaciers, to go cloud-spotting off Tenerife and float turnips in Scottish lochs. Describing one of the most vital but least visible histories in modern science, and rescuing from neglect a host of pioneers who helped us to see how our planet works, it is a remarkable achievement.
Philip Ball, author of H20: A Biography of Water and the Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China
In this cleverly argued and brilliantly written history, Dry traces the interaction between the dramatic careers of six major figures in the history of climatology and the uneven and surprising emergence of a science of climate since the mid-nineteenth century. The book illuminates its history with tales of mountain climbing and dramatic voyages, of tell-tale ice cores and threatening hurricanes. No set of stories could be more urgent now and in need of the care and intelligence with which they are told here. In showing how the focus of these engaging and energetic scientists and their many colleagues gradually shifted from a collective search for the principles of a global climate system to visions of dynamic, interactive and unstable climates in change, this book has much to teach about the roots of the most reliable knowledge of climate and how it should be best understood in its full historical and cultural setting.
Simon Schaffer, Professor of the history and philosophy of science, University of Cambridge
Part history, part biography, part scientific tutorial, part philosophy, Dry humanises and personalises the science of climate change as it has evolved over time. By focusing on a wide selection of important contributors dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Tyndall, Smyth, Riehl, Malkus Simpson, Stommel, Dansgaard, and numerous others) the human story emerges from the science. She describes the fits and starts, the emotional elements, conceptual and observational difficulties, and the sheer fun these scientists had along the way as the understanding of climate emerged as a serious intellectual endeavour.
Carl Wunsch, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In compelling portraits of six scientists and their work, Dry probes the origins of what we now call climate science. She brings alive scientific mysteries about glaciers, clouds, oceans and the atmosphere to show how our present understanding of climate as a complex global system developed over the last 170 years. It’s a brilliant historical jigsaw puzzle, revealing how big questions about our planet have evolved and interlocked. But more than this, she makes a powerful argument about what it means to study the earth. Our knowledge of our planet, and our place on it, grew from concerns and assumptions that are as dynamic and full of change as the natural phenomena we study. How are we driven to ask the questions about nature that we do? Dry’s answers take us to the human heart of science. Exploring her subjects with unfailing insight, she brings each individual set of intellectual passions into focus. Stepping gracefully from Victorian England to late twentieth century Greenland, her biographies illuminate the combination of speculation, observation, calculation, and assumptions that have shaped science at different moments in the past. As she says, global visions come from individuals, particular places and moments in time. Such a profoundly human account of knowledge-building may be our best guide to thinking about the planet’s future.
Katharine Anderson, York University, author of Predicting the Weather
Waters of the World offers a far-reaching and wonderfully unique take on the history of climate science. Focusing on key scientists, some less known than others, the book illustrates vividly and through fine details how studies of different forms of water — from a fluid in the Atlantic Ocean to rainfall in the Indian Monsoon, clouds at the root of hurricanes, and glacial ice on mountain tops and polar ice sheets — were all fundamental for our present-day understanding of both water and the global climate. Dry is an expert at tracing the deep scientific questions of the day, showing how specific scientists — fascinating people themselves — spent their lives trying to resolve those intellectual puzzles of the global environment.
Mark Carey, University of Oregon, author of In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers
In her remarkable Waters of the World, historian Sarah Dry brings to life [the] chain of researchers who helped to reveal the dynamics of Earth’s planetary systems and humanity’s growing impact on them ... As we live through a climate crisis of our own making, the book reveals how researchers, over more than 150 years, defined and measured the processes that got us here — and gave us the knowledge we need to curb their worst impacts.
Ruth A. Morgan, Nature
Sarah Dry’s Waters of the World offers the big science of water … Dry’s call to use her scientific history of the climate to ‘prepare us to see differently, to use the difference of the past to help us conceive of the future with more options in mind’ is laudable.
Financial Times
Dry takes readers on a journey through the history of climate science in this smart, compelling, and timely title. By focusing on specific scientists, Dry gifts readers with entertaining portraits of some thoroughly interesting if largely unknown individuals ... She shows how an artful blending of the personal and professional can result in unusually affecting scientific profiles. A true success on every literary level. STARRED REVIEW
Booklist
Characterised by strong storytelling within a scholarly framework, this book will appeal to readers interested in how science is performed and accomplished, and anyone curious about Earth’s changing climate.
Library Journal
In a very limited nutshell, the story of how we, today, have meteorological forecasts that are getting nearer and nearer to being correct is down to astronomers, simple old time sailor logic, men dabbling in weather research, the British Raj, and the attempt to predict the Monsoon after several years of famine. It all makes a fantastic compilation.
NB
An illuminating tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space.
Readings
This is a skilful, clever and entertaining book and a definite must-read for anyone left scratching their head on climate change.
Sarah Hudson, The Weekly Times
[An] exacting but rewarding read … this is one of the many books that Federal MPs should read and understand before they can qualify for office.
Grey Kelly, Talking Heads Magazine
Dry’s writing is both powerful and poetic.
Michael Adams, Australian Book Review
It reminds us how little we once knew and how, not long ago, scientists made mistakes as big, crazy, and glorious as their discoveries. It also reminds us how young the idea of connectedness is; we are in the infancy of understanding how everything from ice sheets to ocean gyres are interwoven. Perhaps here is where Dry is onto something. Maybe our grasp of that connectedness will be the key to facing climate change, humanity’s biggest challenge.
Gretchen Lida, Washington Independent Review of Books
Waters of the World takes readers from the lab to the study to the field and back again … [It is] an accessible work of science history that draws on some of the best recent scholarship in the field … A history that functions as a plea for interdisciplinary work on the problem of climate. The book ends with a call to climate scientists to embrace their interdisciplinary roots and to recognise and celebrate that there are ‘multiple ways of knowing the planet’.
Lydia Barnett, Science
In the eight detailed, immensely readable essays of Waters of the World, Dry shows how over the past 150 years scientists have slowly come to see climate as a global system, and to recognise how human activity contributes to changes in the complex interactions of ice, oceans, and the atmosphere … Dry looks beneath her subjects’ masks with sympathy and curiosity. Noting their shared sense of a quest, at once playful and serious, in the end she turns back to the reader: ‘They each, in their own way, sought something deeply meaningful from their engagement with the planet. So should we all’.
Jenny Uglow, New York Review of Books
Dry’s assured and fluid prose unravels the complicated concepts across the disciplines that comprise climate science. The interconnected forces that move heat from tropics to poles and that drive ocean and air currents are analysed in a masterful, entertaining way. It becomes clear that Earth operates as a complex and turbulent machine. Waters of the World chronicles how much we have learned, how much we don’t know, and how much we need to learn if we are to halt the pace of global warming.
Rachel Jagareski, Foreword Reviews
Science historian Dry presents smart, entertaining, and timely profiles of intriguing, little-known scientists and their epic research into the power of water in all of its forms and its role in shaping climate.
Donna Seaman, Booklist, ‘Top Ten Sci-Tech: 2019’
In this work, science historian Dry describes key early discoveries in the hydrological cycle and in climate science through the lens of the scientists responsible for those advances … Designed to be readily consumed by non-specialists, the book is accessibly written and liberally peppered with humorous anecdotes … Highly recommended.
S.C. Pryor, Choice
The stories cover nearly 200 years of history, and along the way, Dry builds a clear and cogent picture of Earth’s climate system from the different disciplinary foundations of her chosen characters. It is unusual for a history book to contribute to the readers’ appreciation and knowledge of both science and history, but Dry has accomplished that … She highlights how the pursuit of knowledge by scientists is often also a personal pursuit of wonder, adventure, beauty, and peace. … I highly recommend it. I think experts and nonscientists will enjoy the read, and both will gain perspective they didn’t have before.
K. Halimeda Kilbourne, Physics Today
Deborah R. Coen, author of Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale
An account of the two-hundred-year effort to understand the world’s climate system, Waters of the World is not only timely but also one of the most beautifully written books on science that I have seen in a long time. It is one thing to communicate this complex and important topic lucidly, but quite another to make the material seductive, poetic, enthralling. I was left wanting to read John Tyndall’s writings on ice, to hear the epic creak of Alpine glaciers, to go cloud-spotting off Tenerife and float turnips in Scottish lochs. Describing one of the most vital but least visible histories in modern science, and rescuing from neglect a host of pioneers who helped us to see how our planet works, it is a remarkable achievement.
Philip Ball, author of H20: A Biography of Water and the Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China
In this cleverly argued and brilliantly written history, Dry traces the interaction between the dramatic careers of six major figures in the history of climatology and the uneven and surprising emergence of a science of climate since the mid-nineteenth century. The book illuminates its history with tales of mountain climbing and dramatic voyages, of tell-tale ice cores and threatening hurricanes. No set of stories could be more urgent now and in need of the care and intelligence with which they are told here. In showing how the focus of these engaging and energetic scientists and their many colleagues gradually shifted from a collective search for the principles of a global climate system to visions of dynamic, interactive and unstable climates in change, this book has much to teach about the roots of the most reliable knowledge of climate and how it should be best understood in its full historical and cultural setting.
Simon Schaffer, Professor of the history and philosophy of science, University of Cambridge
Part history, part biography, part scientific tutorial, part philosophy, Dry humanises and personalises the science of climate change as it has evolved over time. By focusing on a wide selection of important contributors dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Tyndall, Smyth, Riehl, Malkus Simpson, Stommel, Dansgaard, and numerous others) the human story emerges from the science. She describes the fits and starts, the emotional elements, conceptual and observational difficulties, and the sheer fun these scientists had along the way as the understanding of climate emerged as a serious intellectual endeavour.
Carl Wunsch, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In compelling portraits of six scientists and their work, Dry probes the origins of what we now call climate science. She brings alive scientific mysteries about glaciers, clouds, oceans and the atmosphere to show how our present understanding of climate as a complex global system developed over the last 170 years. It’s a brilliant historical jigsaw puzzle, revealing how big questions about our planet have evolved and interlocked. But more than this, she makes a powerful argument about what it means to study the earth. Our knowledge of our planet, and our place on it, grew from concerns and assumptions that are as dynamic and full of change as the natural phenomena we study. How are we driven to ask the questions about nature that we do? Dry’s answers take us to the human heart of science. Exploring her subjects with unfailing insight, she brings each individual set of intellectual passions into focus. Stepping gracefully from Victorian England to late twentieth century Greenland, her biographies illuminate the combination of speculation, observation, calculation, and assumptions that have shaped science at different moments in the past. As she says, global visions come from individuals, particular places and moments in time. Such a profoundly human account of knowledge-building may be our best guide to thinking about the planet’s future.
Katharine Anderson, York University, author of Predicting the Weather
Waters of the World offers a far-reaching and wonderfully unique take on the history of climate science. Focusing on key scientists, some less known than others, the book illustrates vividly and through fine details how studies of different forms of water — from a fluid in the Atlantic Ocean to rainfall in the Indian Monsoon, clouds at the root of hurricanes, and glacial ice on mountain tops and polar ice sheets — were all fundamental for our present-day understanding of both water and the global climate. Dry is an expert at tracing the deep scientific questions of the day, showing how specific scientists — fascinating people themselves — spent their lives trying to resolve those intellectual puzzles of the global environment.
Mark Carey, University of Oregon, author of In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers
In her remarkable Waters of the World, historian Sarah Dry brings to life [the] chain of researchers who helped to reveal the dynamics of Earth’s planetary systems and humanity’s growing impact on them ... As we live through a climate crisis of our own making, the book reveals how researchers, over more than 150 years, defined and measured the processes that got us here — and gave us the knowledge we need to curb their worst impacts.
Ruth A. Morgan, Nature
Sarah Dry’s Waters of the World offers the big science of water … Dry’s call to use her scientific history of the climate to ‘prepare us to see differently, to use the difference of the past to help us conceive of the future with more options in mind’ is laudable.
Financial Times
Dry takes readers on a journey through the history of climate science in this smart, compelling, and timely title. By focusing on specific scientists, Dry gifts readers with entertaining portraits of some thoroughly interesting if largely unknown individuals ... She shows how an artful blending of the personal and professional can result in unusually affecting scientific profiles. A true success on every literary level. STARRED REVIEW
Booklist
Characterised by strong storytelling within a scholarly framework, this book will appeal to readers interested in how science is performed and accomplished, and anyone curious about Earth’s changing climate.
Library Journal
In a very limited nutshell, the story of how we, today, have meteorological forecasts that are getting nearer and nearer to being correct is down to astronomers, simple old time sailor logic, men dabbling in weather research, the British Raj, and the attempt to predict the Monsoon after several years of famine. It all makes a fantastic compilation.
NB
An illuminating tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space.
Readings
This is a skilful, clever and entertaining book and a definite must-read for anyone left scratching their head on climate change.
Sarah Hudson, The Weekly Times
[An] exacting but rewarding read … this is one of the many books that Federal MPs should read and understand before they can qualify for office.
Grey Kelly, Talking Heads Magazine
Dry’s writing is both powerful and poetic.
Michael Adams, Australian Book Review
It reminds us how little we once knew and how, not long ago, scientists made mistakes as big, crazy, and glorious as their discoveries. It also reminds us how young the idea of connectedness is; we are in the infancy of understanding how everything from ice sheets to ocean gyres are interwoven. Perhaps here is where Dry is onto something. Maybe our grasp of that connectedness will be the key to facing climate change, humanity’s biggest challenge.
Gretchen Lida, Washington Independent Review of Books
Waters of the World takes readers from the lab to the study to the field and back again … [It is] an accessible work of science history that draws on some of the best recent scholarship in the field … A history that functions as a plea for interdisciplinary work on the problem of climate. The book ends with a call to climate scientists to embrace their interdisciplinary roots and to recognise and celebrate that there are ‘multiple ways of knowing the planet’.
Lydia Barnett, Science
In the eight detailed, immensely readable essays of Waters of the World, Dry shows how over the past 150 years scientists have slowly come to see climate as a global system, and to recognise how human activity contributes to changes in the complex interactions of ice, oceans, and the atmosphere … Dry looks beneath her subjects’ masks with sympathy and curiosity. Noting their shared sense of a quest, at once playful and serious, in the end she turns back to the reader: ‘They each, in their own way, sought something deeply meaningful from their engagement with the planet. So should we all’.
Jenny Uglow, New York Review of Books
Dry’s assured and fluid prose unravels the complicated concepts across the disciplines that comprise climate science. The interconnected forces that move heat from tropics to poles and that drive ocean and air currents are analysed in a masterful, entertaining way. It becomes clear that Earth operates as a complex and turbulent machine. Waters of the World chronicles how much we have learned, how much we don’t know, and how much we need to learn if we are to halt the pace of global warming.
Rachel Jagareski, Foreword Reviews
Science historian Dry presents smart, entertaining, and timely profiles of intriguing, little-known scientists and their epic research into the power of water in all of its forms and its role in shaping climate.
Donna Seaman, Booklist, ‘Top Ten Sci-Tech: 2019’
In this work, science historian Dry describes key early discoveries in the hydrological cycle and in climate science through the lens of the scientists responsible for those advances … Designed to be readily consumed by non-specialists, the book is accessibly written and liberally peppered with humorous anecdotes … Highly recommended.
S.C. Pryor, Choice
The stories cover nearly 200 years of history, and along the way, Dry builds a clear and cogent picture of Earth’s climate system from the different disciplinary foundations of her chosen characters. It is unusual for a history book to contribute to the readers’ appreciation and knowledge of both science and history, but Dry has accomplished that … She highlights how the pursuit of knowledge by scientists is often also a personal pursuit of wonder, adventure, beauty, and peace. … I highly recommend it. I think experts and nonscientists will enjoy the read, and both will gain perspective they didn’t have before.
K. Halimeda Kilbourne, Physics Today
Waters of the World: the story of the scientists who unravelled the mysteries of our seas, glaciers, and atmosphere — and made the planet whole by Sarah Dry
Waters of the World sparkles with lyricism and wit. Dry is a gifted storyteller, and her research into the pre-history of Earth system science has turned up gripping tales of risk, adventure, defiance, and discovery. A unique and important book.
Deborah R. Coen, author of Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale
An account of the two-hundred-year effort to understand the world’s climate system, Waters of the World is not only timely but also one of the most beautifully written books on science that I have seen in a long time. It is one thing to communicate this complex and important topic lucidly, but quite another to make the material seductive, poetic, enthralling. I was left wanting to read John Tyndall’s writings on ice, to hear the epic creak of Alpine glaciers, to go cloud-spotting off Tenerife and float turnips in Scottish lochs. Describing one of the most vital but least visible histories in modern science, and rescuing from neglect a host of pioneers who helped us to see how our planet works, it is a remarkable achievement.
Philip Ball, author of H20: A Biography of Water and the Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China
In this cleverly argued and brilliantly written history, Dry traces the interaction between the dramatic careers of six major figures in the history of climatology and the uneven and surprising emergence of a science of climate since the mid-nineteenth century. The book illuminates its history with tales of mountain climbing and dramatic voyages, of tell-tale ice cores and threatening hurricanes. No set of stories could be more urgent now and in need of the care and intelligence with which they are told here. In showing how the focus of these engaging and energetic scientists and their many colleagues gradually shifted from a collective search for the principles of a global climate system to visions of dynamic, interactive and unstable climates in change, this book has much to teach about the roots of the most reliable knowledge of climate and how it should be best understood in its full historical and cultural setting.
Simon Schaffer, Professor of the history and philosophy of science, University of Cambridge
Part history, part biography, part scientific tutorial, part philosophy, Dry humanises and personalises the science of climate change as it has evolved over time. By focusing on a wide selection of important contributors dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Tyndall, Smyth, Riehl, Malkus Simpson, Stommel, Dansgaard, and numerous others) the human story emerges from the science. She describes the fits and starts, the emotional elements, conceptual and observational difficulties, and the sheer fun these scientists had along the way as the understanding of climate emerged as a serious intellectual endeavour.
Carl Wunsch, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In compelling portraits of six scientists and their work, Dry probes the origins of what we now call climate science. She brings alive scientific mysteries about glaciers, clouds, oceans and the atmosphere to show how our present understanding of climate as a complex global system developed over the last 170 years. It’s a brilliant historical jigsaw puzzle, revealing how big questions about our planet have evolved and interlocked. But more than this, she makes a powerful argument about what it means to study the earth. Our knowledge of our planet, and our place on it, grew from concerns and assumptions that are as dynamic and full of change as the natural phenomena we study. How are we driven to ask the questions about nature that we do? Dry’s answers take us to the human heart of science. Exploring her subjects with unfailing insight, she brings each individual set of intellectual passions into focus. Stepping gracefully from Victorian England to late twentieth century Greenland, her biographies illuminate the combination of speculation, observation, calculation, and assumptions that have shaped science at different moments in the past. As she says, global visions come from individuals, particular places and moments in time. Such a profoundly human account of knowledge-building may be our best guide to thinking about the planet’s future.
Katharine Anderson, York University, author of Predicting the Weather
Waters of the World offers a far-reaching and wonderfully unique take on the history of climate science. Focusing on key scientists, some less known than others, the book illustrates vividly and through fine details how studies of different forms of water — from a fluid in the Atlantic Ocean to rainfall in the Indian Monsoon, clouds at the root of hurricanes, and glacial ice on mountain tops and polar ice sheets — were all fundamental for our present-day understanding of both water and the global climate. Dry is an expert at tracing the deep scientific questions of the day, showing how specific scientists — fascinating people themselves — spent their lives trying to resolve those intellectual puzzles of the global environment.
Mark Carey, University of Oregon, author of In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers
In her remarkable Waters of the World, historian Sarah Dry brings to life [the] chain of researchers who helped to reveal the dynamics of Earth’s planetary systems and humanity’s growing impact on them ... As we live through a climate crisis of our own making, the book reveals how researchers, over more than 150 years, defined and measured the processes that got us here — and gave us the knowledge we need to curb their worst impacts.
Ruth A. Morgan, Nature
Sarah Dry’s Waters of the World offers the big science of water … Dry’s call to use her scientific history of the climate to ‘prepare us to see differently, to use the difference of the past to help us conceive of the future with more options in mind’ is laudable.
Financial Times
Dry takes readers on a journey through the history of climate science in this smart, compelling, and timely title. By focusing on specific scientists, Dry gifts readers with entertaining portraits of some thoroughly interesting if largely unknown individuals ... She shows how an artful blending of the personal and professional can result in unusually affecting scientific profiles. A true success on every literary level. STARRED REVIEW
Booklist
Characterised by strong storytelling within a scholarly framework, this book will appeal to readers interested in how science is performed and accomplished, and anyone curious about Earth’s changing climate.
Library Journal
In a very limited nutshell, the story of how we, today, have meteorological forecasts that are getting nearer and nearer to being correct is down to astronomers, simple old time sailor logic, men dabbling in weather research, the British Raj, and the attempt to predict the Monsoon after several years of famine. It all makes a fantastic compilation.
NB
An illuminating tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space.
Readings
This is a skilful, clever and entertaining book and a definite must-read for anyone left scratching their head on climate change.
Sarah Hudson, The Weekly Times
[An] exacting but rewarding read … this is one of the many books that Federal MPs should read and understand before they can qualify for office.
Grey Kelly, Talking Heads Magazine
Dry’s writing is both powerful and poetic.
Michael Adams, Australian Book Review
It reminds us how little we once knew and how, not long ago, scientists made mistakes as big, crazy, and glorious as their discoveries. It also reminds us how young the idea of connectedness is; we are in the infancy of understanding how everything from ice sheets to ocean gyres are interwoven. Perhaps here is where Dry is onto something. Maybe our grasp of that connectedness will be the key to facing climate change, humanity’s biggest challenge.
Gretchen Lida, Washington Independent Review of Books
Waters of the World takes readers from the lab to the study to the field and back again … [It is] an accessible work of science history that draws on some of the best recent scholarship in the field … A history that functions as a plea for interdisciplinary work on the problem of climate. The book ends with a call to climate scientists to embrace their interdisciplinary roots and to recognise and celebrate that there are ‘multiple ways of knowing the planet’.
Lydia Barnett, Science
In the eight detailed, immensely readable essays of Waters of the World, Dry shows how over the past 150 years scientists have slowly come to see climate as a global system, and to recognise how human activity contributes to changes in the complex interactions of ice, oceans, and the atmosphere … Dry looks beneath her subjects’ masks with sympathy and curiosity. Noting their shared sense of a quest, at once playful and serious, in the end she turns back to the reader: ‘They each, in their own way, sought something deeply meaningful from their engagement with the planet. So should we all’.
Jenny Uglow, New York Review of Books
Dry’s assured and fluid prose unravels the complicated concepts across the disciplines that comprise climate science. The interconnected forces that move heat from tropics to poles and that drive ocean and air currents are analysed in a masterful, entertaining way. It becomes clear that Earth operates as a complex and turbulent machine. Waters of the World chronicles how much we have learned, how much we don’t know, and how much we need to learn if we are to halt the pace of global warming.
Rachel Jagareski, Foreword Reviews
Science historian Dry presents smart, entertaining, and timely profiles of intriguing, little-known scientists and their epic research into the power of water in all of its forms and its role in shaping climate.
Donna Seaman, Booklist, ‘Top Ten Sci-Tech: 2019’
In this work, science historian Dry describes key early discoveries in the hydrological cycle and in climate science through the lens of the scientists responsible for those advances … Designed to be readily consumed by non-specialists, the book is accessibly written and liberally peppered with humorous anecdotes … Highly recommended.
S.C. Pryor, Choice
The stories cover nearly 200 years of history, and along the way, Dry builds a clear and cogent picture of Earth’s climate system from the different disciplinary foundations of her chosen characters. It is unusual for a history book to contribute to the readers’ appreciation and knowledge of both science and history, but Dry has accomplished that … She highlights how the pursuit of knowledge by scientists is often also a personal pursuit of wonder, adventure, beauty, and peace. … I highly recommend it. I think experts and nonscientists will enjoy the read, and both will gain perspective they didn’t have before.
K. Halimeda Kilbourne, Physics Today
Deborah R. Coen, author of Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale
An account of the two-hundred-year effort to understand the world’s climate system, Waters of the World is not only timely but also one of the most beautifully written books on science that I have seen in a long time. It is one thing to communicate this complex and important topic lucidly, but quite another to make the material seductive, poetic, enthralling. I was left wanting to read John Tyndall’s writings on ice, to hear the epic creak of Alpine glaciers, to go cloud-spotting off Tenerife and float turnips in Scottish lochs. Describing one of the most vital but least visible histories in modern science, and rescuing from neglect a host of pioneers who helped us to see how our planet works, it is a remarkable achievement.
Philip Ball, author of H20: A Biography of Water and the Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China
In this cleverly argued and brilliantly written history, Dry traces the interaction between the dramatic careers of six major figures in the history of climatology and the uneven and surprising emergence of a science of climate since the mid-nineteenth century. The book illuminates its history with tales of mountain climbing and dramatic voyages, of tell-tale ice cores and threatening hurricanes. No set of stories could be more urgent now and in need of the care and intelligence with which they are told here. In showing how the focus of these engaging and energetic scientists and their many colleagues gradually shifted from a collective search for the principles of a global climate system to visions of dynamic, interactive and unstable climates in change, this book has much to teach about the roots of the most reliable knowledge of climate and how it should be best understood in its full historical and cultural setting.
Simon Schaffer, Professor of the history and philosophy of science, University of Cambridge
Part history, part biography, part scientific tutorial, part philosophy, Dry humanises and personalises the science of climate change as it has evolved over time. By focusing on a wide selection of important contributors dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Tyndall, Smyth, Riehl, Malkus Simpson, Stommel, Dansgaard, and numerous others) the human story emerges from the science. She describes the fits and starts, the emotional elements, conceptual and observational difficulties, and the sheer fun these scientists had along the way as the understanding of climate emerged as a serious intellectual endeavour.
Carl Wunsch, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In compelling portraits of six scientists and their work, Dry probes the origins of what we now call climate science. She brings alive scientific mysteries about glaciers, clouds, oceans and the atmosphere to show how our present understanding of climate as a complex global system developed over the last 170 years. It’s a brilliant historical jigsaw puzzle, revealing how big questions about our planet have evolved and interlocked. But more than this, she makes a powerful argument about what it means to study the earth. Our knowledge of our planet, and our place on it, grew from concerns and assumptions that are as dynamic and full of change as the natural phenomena we study. How are we driven to ask the questions about nature that we do? Dry’s answers take us to the human heart of science. Exploring her subjects with unfailing insight, she brings each individual set of intellectual passions into focus. Stepping gracefully from Victorian England to late twentieth century Greenland, her biographies illuminate the combination of speculation, observation, calculation, and assumptions that have shaped science at different moments in the past. As she says, global visions come from individuals, particular places and moments in time. Such a profoundly human account of knowledge-building may be our best guide to thinking about the planet’s future.
Katharine Anderson, York University, author of Predicting the Weather
Waters of the World offers a far-reaching and wonderfully unique take on the history of climate science. Focusing on key scientists, some less known than others, the book illustrates vividly and through fine details how studies of different forms of water — from a fluid in the Atlantic Ocean to rainfall in the Indian Monsoon, clouds at the root of hurricanes, and glacial ice on mountain tops and polar ice sheets — were all fundamental for our present-day understanding of both water and the global climate. Dry is an expert at tracing the deep scientific questions of the day, showing how specific scientists — fascinating people themselves — spent their lives trying to resolve those intellectual puzzles of the global environment.
Mark Carey, University of Oregon, author of In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers
In her remarkable Waters of the World, historian Sarah Dry brings to life [the] chain of researchers who helped to reveal the dynamics of Earth’s planetary systems and humanity’s growing impact on them ... As we live through a climate crisis of our own making, the book reveals how researchers, over more than 150 years, defined and measured the processes that got us here — and gave us the knowledge we need to curb their worst impacts.
Ruth A. Morgan, Nature
Sarah Dry’s Waters of the World offers the big science of water … Dry’s call to use her scientific history of the climate to ‘prepare us to see differently, to use the difference of the past to help us conceive of the future with more options in mind’ is laudable.
Financial Times
Dry takes readers on a journey through the history of climate science in this smart, compelling, and timely title. By focusing on specific scientists, Dry gifts readers with entertaining portraits of some thoroughly interesting if largely unknown individuals ... She shows how an artful blending of the personal and professional can result in unusually affecting scientific profiles. A true success on every literary level. STARRED REVIEW
Booklist
Characterised by strong storytelling within a scholarly framework, this book will appeal to readers interested in how science is performed and accomplished, and anyone curious about Earth’s changing climate.
Library Journal
In a very limited nutshell, the story of how we, today, have meteorological forecasts that are getting nearer and nearer to being correct is down to astronomers, simple old time sailor logic, men dabbling in weather research, the British Raj, and the attempt to predict the Monsoon after several years of famine. It all makes a fantastic compilation.
NB
An illuminating tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space.
Readings
This is a skilful, clever and entertaining book and a definite must-read for anyone left scratching their head on climate change.
Sarah Hudson, The Weekly Times
[An] exacting but rewarding read … this is one of the many books that Federal MPs should read and understand before they can qualify for office.
Grey Kelly, Talking Heads Magazine
Dry’s writing is both powerful and poetic.
Michael Adams, Australian Book Review
It reminds us how little we once knew and how, not long ago, scientists made mistakes as big, crazy, and glorious as their discoveries. It also reminds us how young the idea of connectedness is; we are in the infancy of understanding how everything from ice sheets to ocean gyres are interwoven. Perhaps here is where Dry is onto something. Maybe our grasp of that connectedness will be the key to facing climate change, humanity’s biggest challenge.
Gretchen Lida, Washington Independent Review of Books
Waters of the World takes readers from the lab to the study to the field and back again … [It is] an accessible work of science history that draws on some of the best recent scholarship in the field … A history that functions as a plea for interdisciplinary work on the problem of climate. The book ends with a call to climate scientists to embrace their interdisciplinary roots and to recognise and celebrate that there are ‘multiple ways of knowing the planet’.
Lydia Barnett, Science
In the eight detailed, immensely readable essays of Waters of the World, Dry shows how over the past 150 years scientists have slowly come to see climate as a global system, and to recognise how human activity contributes to changes in the complex interactions of ice, oceans, and the atmosphere … Dry looks beneath her subjects’ masks with sympathy and curiosity. Noting their shared sense of a quest, at once playful and serious, in the end she turns back to the reader: ‘They each, in their own way, sought something deeply meaningful from their engagement with the planet. So should we all’.
Jenny Uglow, New York Review of Books
Dry’s assured and fluid prose unravels the complicated concepts across the disciplines that comprise climate science. The interconnected forces that move heat from tropics to poles and that drive ocean and air currents are analysed in a masterful, entertaining way. It becomes clear that Earth operates as a complex and turbulent machine. Waters of the World chronicles how much we have learned, how much we don’t know, and how much we need to learn if we are to halt the pace of global warming.
Rachel Jagareski, Foreword Reviews
Science historian Dry presents smart, entertaining, and timely profiles of intriguing, little-known scientists and their epic research into the power of water in all of its forms and its role in shaping climate.
Donna Seaman, Booklist, ‘Top Ten Sci-Tech: 2019’
In this work, science historian Dry describes key early discoveries in the hydrological cycle and in climate science through the lens of the scientists responsible for those advances … Designed to be readily consumed by non-specialists, the book is accessibly written and liberally peppered with humorous anecdotes … Highly recommended.
S.C. Pryor, Choice
The stories cover nearly 200 years of history, and along the way, Dry builds a clear and cogent picture of Earth’s climate system from the different disciplinary foundations of her chosen characters. It is unusual for a history book to contribute to the readers’ appreciation and knowledge of both science and history, but Dry has accomplished that … She highlights how the pursuit of knowledge by scientists is often also a personal pursuit of wonder, adventure, beauty, and peace. … I highly recommend it. I think experts and nonscientists will enjoy the read, and both will gain perspective they didn’t have before.
K. Halimeda Kilbourne, Physics Today
Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel M. Lavery
Ortberg’s playful takes on pop culture as he explores everything from House Hunters to Golden Girls to Lord Byron, Lacan, and Rilke … Ortberg’s writing is vulnerable but confident, specific but never narrow, literal and lyrical. The author is refreshingly unafraid of his own uncertainty, but he’s always definitive where it counts … You’ll laugh, you'll cry, often both at once. Everyone should read this extraordinary book. STARRED REVIEW
Kirkus Reviews
Slate advice columnist Ortberg (Texts from Jane Eyre) brings the full force of his wit and literary depth to this genre-bending essay collection. Describing it as ‘memoir-adjacent,’ Ortberg intersperses searingly honest passages about his journey as a transgender man with laugh-out-loud funny literary pastiche ... Ortberg provides an often hilarious, sometimes discomfiting, but invariably honest account of one man’s becoming.
Publishers Weekly
Like all of his work, Something That May Shock and Discredit You is a stand-alone pillar in Ortberg’s remarkable canon, one in which the lines typically drawn around topic and genre are obliterated, resulting in a wide-open field of possibility.
Electric Literature
This book is clever and strange and lovely and sad and hysterical and poignant. These are the qualities that make up most of my favourite people and all of my favourite books. You really need to read this now.
Jenny Lawson, New York Times bestselling author of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy
Deeply honest and often sidesplittingly funny.
Michelle Hart, O: The Oprah Magazine
At last, we have the work of transgender bathos we didn’t know we needed, but very much do … Ortberg’s narrative is anything but linear: It skips back in time to mythic Greece, traipses across the landscape of contemporary pop culture and, in one wonderfully fabulist entry that would make Carmen Maria Machado proud, slips outside of time altogether … One of our smartest, most inventive humour writers, Ortberg combines bathos and the devotional into a revelation … By broadening what transgender memoir can do, the author is in good company with Viviane Namaste, who decades ago diagnosed autobiography as ‘the only discourse in which transsexuals are permitted to speak.’ Ortberg partakes of neither the damaging trope of tragic transness nor the sentimental sanctimony that we are “permitted,” offering instead the comic and the transcendent.
Jordy Rosenberg, The New York Times
[A] memoir comprised of the humorous essays that have become his trademark … Some are essays and some are scripts or imagined conversations; at first the chapters and interludes are distinct, but at a certain point they start to blend together. All are hilarious, infused with the type of magical thinking Lavery excels at. They weave Lavery’s life experiences together with his historical and pop-cultural obsessions.
Claire Landsbaum, Vanity Fair
[A] a hybrid of incisive cultural criticism and heartfelt rumination on transitioning and queer identity.
Erin Keane, Ashlie D. Stevens, and Hanh Nguyen, Salon
Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s Something That May Shock And Discredit You is three eloquent books in one: memoir, essay collection, and treasure trove of cultural analysis, all coming in under 250 pages. Ortberg is as nimble a storyteller as they come, so the shifts from painful personal revelations to pithy observations about Lord Byron turn on a dime while still mostly feeling part of the same whole … The details are all Ortberg, as is the ability to turn eschatology into something more accessible and less judgmental.
Danette Chavez, The A.V Club
With this collection of essays, he will make you laugh and cry with stories of transition, family, culture and William Shatner.
Karla Strand, Ms.
[Ortberg] puts his dazzling wit and humour on display in a ‘memoir-adjacent’ collection of essays that touches on topics as wide-ranging as Lord Byron, the Bible and House Hunters in his exploration of self as a transgender man.
Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today
The ‘Dear Prudence’ columnist and expert culture commentator returns with his sharpest, wittiest collection yet, a survey of pop culture ranging from scathing to plain weird.
David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly
[A] fusion of old and new Ortberg work. It’s a collection of chapters and fragments, pieces that refuse single identities … The intensity of emotion and self-centredness are stripped of their high language, and become vividly queer, utterly recognisable, and essential to the gender mode that Ortberg himself is learning to express throughout this collection … Ortberg is perhaps closer than any other writer to functioning as the voice of progressive millennials … Every movement of Ortberg’s writing as he considers gender is hesitant, and his use of upspeak inflection both satirises the femininity associated with that questioning tone and engages with it genuinely. There must be a space between being prepared to mock gender norms and being deeply uncertain about them. The sincerity beneath the humour is new in Ortberg’s work, and powerful and well as disconcerting … The book is emotionally effective, but not always entirely accessible. In many ways, Ortberg’s transition is likely to be less alien to many readers than his deep Biblical knowledge … Ortberg’s least accessible book, but also his most important. Unlike his earlier work, Shock and Discredit must be read slowly, and with reflection. It’s not always easy. The breezy humour sometimes dives deep into New Testament referentiality without actually gesturing to deep faith. Read slowly to keep from flailing. Ortberg’s writing will wait for you to catch up.
Annette Lapointe, The New York Journal of Books
A … kind of glee animates Ortberg’s writing, and it rushes all the way through this thoughtful, joyous book. Even when Something That May Shock and Discredit You delves into difficult material … Ortberg always writes with a sense of profound and honest delight: What luck, it’s another day where he gets to be a man. And reading, you can’t help but be delighted with him … This book is odd and self-satisfied and bizarrely specific, in all the best possible ways. Consistently, it’s funny … But Something That May Shock and Discredit You is also tenderly, gently thoughtful about gender and about what it means to transition, especially for someone like Ortberg, who built a public reputation as a feminist running a women’s website before coming out … Something That May Shock and Discredit You is not precisely an explanation for everyone who was wondering why the person they first knew as Mallory Ortberg is now Daniel M. Lavery. It is neither apologetic nor self-justifying, and Ortberg remains very clear on the fact that he does not owe an explanation about himself or his gender to anyone … Instead, this book reads like an exploration — a funny, gentle, thoughtful exploration — of how Ortberg sees the world, and how transitioning affected the lens through which he sees it. Reading it feels like reading the Toast felt in 2013, which is to say it feels like coming into contact with a restless and smart mind of profound and specific hyperfixations. It’s a joy.
Constance Grady, Vox
Something That May Shock and Discredit You offers a vital account of transition and gender identity … [It] allows space for confusion and uncertainty, while also offering the wisdom of hindsight … [It] is funny while remaining sincere, and is inventive in its use of different forms to explore various aspects of his experiences.
Erin Stewart, ArtsHub
Daniel Lavery ... has penned a book ostensibly about the experience of transition, but effortlessly traverses religion, philosophy… and William Shatner? In Something That May Shock and Discredit You Lavery’s innermost expressions of vulnerability are rendered with remarkable candour in some passages. Other passages are flat-out hilarious. All, however, are poignant.
Dan Shaw, Happy Magazine
Inimitably witty.
Nicole Elphick, The Age
Ortberg gracefully slips between the memoirist’s lucid personal narrative and the essayist’s more topical ruminations. Passage after passage sees him refining a riveting intertextual portrait of his life and transness fit for the pages of an illuminated manuscript … Discarding any distinction between high and low cultures, Ortberg’s Something that May Shock and Discredit You most certainly astonishes and amazes — it may even be transformative.
Dave Wheeler, Shelf Awareness
Ortberg does not simply narrate his experience of transition; he also grapples with the challenge of doing so, toggling skillfully between criticism, personal essay, and literary pastiche … Animated by Ortberg’s Christian faith and eclectic cultural enthusiasms, the book is a syllabus of sorts — a road map for navigating one remarkable writer’s mind.
The New Yorker
Written almost as a stream of consciousness, this genre-bending work by Slate columnist Ortberg blends memoir, social commentary, and biblical exegesis in a series of essays that reflect an evolving sense of identity. Similar to his work as co-founder of The Toast, Ortberg’s brief chapters here expand on topics serious and challenging, humorous and trivial … This account of a vulnerable life makes for contemplative reading.
Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal
For those who have no firsthand experience of gender transitioning, this book is an education in empathy, solidarity and compassion, and an ode to the courage and resilience of transgender people. It’ll make you think, laugh and maybe reconsider some of your preconceptions about gender. If nothing else, you’ll never look at the Bible the same way again.
Zoya Patel, The Canberra Times
A bundle of short, eclectic and wonderfully funny essays.
The Telegraph
Part satire, part confessional and all utterly original, Lavery’s third book is a wild rollercoaster of a read that defies definition. It’s a riotous stew of diarist self-examination, taut comic sketches, and queer readings … At a moment of renewed global transphobia, when Leslie Feinberg’s tragic Stone Butch Blues remains the touchstone of transmasculine literature, Lavery’s kaleidoscopic memoir is a refreshing reminder of the possibility of trans irreverence, trans peace — even trans joy.
Yves Rees, Inside Story
Kirkus Reviews
Slate advice columnist Ortberg (Texts from Jane Eyre) brings the full force of his wit and literary depth to this genre-bending essay collection. Describing it as ‘memoir-adjacent,’ Ortberg intersperses searingly honest passages about his journey as a transgender man with laugh-out-loud funny literary pastiche ... Ortberg provides an often hilarious, sometimes discomfiting, but invariably honest account of one man’s becoming.
Publishers Weekly
Like all of his work, Something That May Shock and Discredit You is a stand-alone pillar in Ortberg’s remarkable canon, one in which the lines typically drawn around topic and genre are obliterated, resulting in a wide-open field of possibility.
Electric Literature
This book is clever and strange and lovely and sad and hysterical and poignant. These are the qualities that make up most of my favourite people and all of my favourite books. You really need to read this now.
Jenny Lawson, New York Times bestselling author of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy
Deeply honest and often sidesplittingly funny.
Michelle Hart, O: The Oprah Magazine
At last, we have the work of transgender bathos we didn’t know we needed, but very much do … Ortberg’s narrative is anything but linear: It skips back in time to mythic Greece, traipses across the landscape of contemporary pop culture and, in one wonderfully fabulist entry that would make Carmen Maria Machado proud, slips outside of time altogether … One of our smartest, most inventive humour writers, Ortberg combines bathos and the devotional into a revelation … By broadening what transgender memoir can do, the author is in good company with Viviane Namaste, who decades ago diagnosed autobiography as ‘the only discourse in which transsexuals are permitted to speak.’ Ortberg partakes of neither the damaging trope of tragic transness nor the sentimental sanctimony that we are “permitted,” offering instead the comic and the transcendent.
Jordy Rosenberg, The New York Times
[A] memoir comprised of the humorous essays that have become his trademark … Some are essays and some are scripts or imagined conversations; at first the chapters and interludes are distinct, but at a certain point they start to blend together. All are hilarious, infused with the type of magical thinking Lavery excels at. They weave Lavery’s life experiences together with his historical and pop-cultural obsessions.
Claire Landsbaum, Vanity Fair
[A] a hybrid of incisive cultural criticism and heartfelt rumination on transitioning and queer identity.
Erin Keane, Ashlie D. Stevens, and Hanh Nguyen, Salon
Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s Something That May Shock And Discredit You is three eloquent books in one: memoir, essay collection, and treasure trove of cultural analysis, all coming in under 250 pages. Ortberg is as nimble a storyteller as they come, so the shifts from painful personal revelations to pithy observations about Lord Byron turn on a dime while still mostly feeling part of the same whole … The details are all Ortberg, as is the ability to turn eschatology into something more accessible and less judgmental.
Danette Chavez, The A.V Club
With this collection of essays, he will make you laugh and cry with stories of transition, family, culture and William Shatner.
Karla Strand, Ms.
[Ortberg] puts his dazzling wit and humour on display in a ‘memoir-adjacent’ collection of essays that touches on topics as wide-ranging as Lord Byron, the Bible and House Hunters in his exploration of self as a transgender man.
Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today
The ‘Dear Prudence’ columnist and expert culture commentator returns with his sharpest, wittiest collection yet, a survey of pop culture ranging from scathing to plain weird.
David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly
[A] fusion of old and new Ortberg work. It’s a collection of chapters and fragments, pieces that refuse single identities … The intensity of emotion and self-centredness are stripped of their high language, and become vividly queer, utterly recognisable, and essential to the gender mode that Ortberg himself is learning to express throughout this collection … Ortberg is perhaps closer than any other writer to functioning as the voice of progressive millennials … Every movement of Ortberg’s writing as he considers gender is hesitant, and his use of upspeak inflection both satirises the femininity associated with that questioning tone and engages with it genuinely. There must be a space between being prepared to mock gender norms and being deeply uncertain about them. The sincerity beneath the humour is new in Ortberg’s work, and powerful and well as disconcerting … The book is emotionally effective, but not always entirely accessible. In many ways, Ortberg’s transition is likely to be less alien to many readers than his deep Biblical knowledge … Ortberg’s least accessible book, but also his most important. Unlike his earlier work, Shock and Discredit must be read slowly, and with reflection. It’s not always easy. The breezy humour sometimes dives deep into New Testament referentiality without actually gesturing to deep faith. Read slowly to keep from flailing. Ortberg’s writing will wait for you to catch up.
Annette Lapointe, The New York Journal of Books
A … kind of glee animates Ortberg’s writing, and it rushes all the way through this thoughtful, joyous book. Even when Something That May Shock and Discredit You delves into difficult material … Ortberg always writes with a sense of profound and honest delight: What luck, it’s another day where he gets to be a man. And reading, you can’t help but be delighted with him … This book is odd and self-satisfied and bizarrely specific, in all the best possible ways. Consistently, it’s funny … But Something That May Shock and Discredit You is also tenderly, gently thoughtful about gender and about what it means to transition, especially for someone like Ortberg, who built a public reputation as a feminist running a women’s website before coming out … Something That May Shock and Discredit You is not precisely an explanation for everyone who was wondering why the person they first knew as Mallory Ortberg is now Daniel M. Lavery. It is neither apologetic nor self-justifying, and Ortberg remains very clear on the fact that he does not owe an explanation about himself or his gender to anyone … Instead, this book reads like an exploration — a funny, gentle, thoughtful exploration — of how Ortberg sees the world, and how transitioning affected the lens through which he sees it. Reading it feels like reading the Toast felt in 2013, which is to say it feels like coming into contact with a restless and smart mind of profound and specific hyperfixations. It’s a joy.
Constance Grady, Vox
Something That May Shock and Discredit You offers a vital account of transition and gender identity … [It] allows space for confusion and uncertainty, while also offering the wisdom of hindsight … [It] is funny while remaining sincere, and is inventive in its use of different forms to explore various aspects of his experiences.
Erin Stewart, ArtsHub
Daniel Lavery ... has penned a book ostensibly about the experience of transition, but effortlessly traverses religion, philosophy… and William Shatner? In Something That May Shock and Discredit You Lavery’s innermost expressions of vulnerability are rendered with remarkable candour in some passages. Other passages are flat-out hilarious. All, however, are poignant.
Dan Shaw, Happy Magazine
Inimitably witty.
Nicole Elphick, The Age
Ortberg gracefully slips between the memoirist’s lucid personal narrative and the essayist’s more topical ruminations. Passage after passage sees him refining a riveting intertextual portrait of his life and transness fit for the pages of an illuminated manuscript … Discarding any distinction between high and low cultures, Ortberg’s Something that May Shock and Discredit You most certainly astonishes and amazes — it may even be transformative.
Dave Wheeler, Shelf Awareness
Ortberg does not simply narrate his experience of transition; he also grapples with the challenge of doing so, toggling skillfully between criticism, personal essay, and literary pastiche … Animated by Ortberg’s Christian faith and eclectic cultural enthusiasms, the book is a syllabus of sorts — a road map for navigating one remarkable writer’s mind.
The New Yorker
Written almost as a stream of consciousness, this genre-bending work by Slate columnist Ortberg blends memoir, social commentary, and biblical exegesis in a series of essays that reflect an evolving sense of identity. Similar to his work as co-founder of The Toast, Ortberg’s brief chapters here expand on topics serious and challenging, humorous and trivial … This account of a vulnerable life makes for contemplative reading.
Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal
For those who have no firsthand experience of gender transitioning, this book is an education in empathy, solidarity and compassion, and an ode to the courage and resilience of transgender people. It’ll make you think, laugh and maybe reconsider some of your preconceptions about gender. If nothing else, you’ll never look at the Bible the same way again.
Zoya Patel, The Canberra Times
A bundle of short, eclectic and wonderfully funny essays.
The Telegraph
Part satire, part confessional and all utterly original, Lavery’s third book is a wild rollercoaster of a read that defies definition. It’s a riotous stew of diarist self-examination, taut comic sketches, and queer readings … At a moment of renewed global transphobia, when Leslie Feinberg’s tragic Stone Butch Blues remains the touchstone of transmasculine literature, Lavery’s kaleidoscopic memoir is a refreshing reminder of the possibility of trans irreverence, trans peace — even trans joy.
Yves Rees, Inside Story