Elizabeth Kolbert's environmental classic Field Notes from a Catastrophe first developed out of a groundbreaking, award-winning three-part series in The New Yorker. She expanded it into a still-concise yet richly researched and damning book about climate change: a primer on the greatest challenge facing the world today.
In the years since, the story has continued to develop; the situation has become more dire, even as our understanding of it grows. Now Kolbert returns to the defining book of her career. She'll add a chapter bringing things up to date on the existing text, plus she'll add three new chapters – on ocean acidification, the tar sands, and a Danish town that's gone carbon neutral. It will, once again, be a must-read for our moment.
Elizabeth Kolbert was a New York Times reporter for fourteen years until she became a staff writer at the New Yorker in 1999. She is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: A Frontline Report on Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and children.
"Kolbert mesmerises with her poetic cadence in this riveting view of the apocalypse already upon us"
– Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
"The most frightening book I've read this century Field Notes from a Catastrophe holds a powerful message for us all and we would do well to heed it"
– Times Literary Supplement
"A detailed and very readable account of the problems many communities are faced with as the puddles form in the Arctic and how we continue to cover our eyes to the visible changes happening around us"
– Ecologist
"A superbly crafted, diligently compressed vision of a world spiralling towards destruction"
– Observer