On Wednesday, April 10 at 7pm, the Harvard Book Store (1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge) welcomes acclaimed writer, editor, and critic Nathaniel Rich—author of Odds Against Tomorrow—for a discussion of his latest book, Losing Earth: A Recent History, an expansion of his groundbreaking New York Times Magazine long-form story.
This event is free; no tickets are required. There will be a chance to purchase his book and have it signed following the talk.
About Losing Earth
By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change―including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours.
The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich’s groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon―the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight.
Now expanded into book form, Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry’s coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The book carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves. Like John Hersey’s Hiroshimaand Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, Losing Earth is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here, and how we must go forward.
“Reading like a Greek tragedy, Losing Earth shows how close we came to making the right choices — if it weren’t for our darker angels.” —NPR.org
“How to explain the mess we’re in? Nathaniel Rich recounts how a crucial decade was squandered. Losing Earth is an important contribution to the record of our heedless age.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction
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