It is not easy to make people feel uneasy, not in the way that seeps into their psyches and stays there, haunting them, even leading them to action. David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth, inspired by the New York magazine deputy editor’s 2017 article by the same name, does not spare readers in its stark, deeply reported and vividly explained portrayals of what awaits our changing planet. (Even an initial skim of the book’s chapter titles—“Heat Death,” “Disasters No Longer Natural,” “Dying Oceans,” “Unbreathable Air”—elicit shivers.) That is, unless readers—and their families, their communities, their countries—commit to change. Wallace-Wells have may have written the most effective antidote to complacency yet.
Buy now: The Uninhabitable Earth