Archives de catégorie : Current Issues

UNDER THE SKY WE MAKE de Kimberly Nicholas

It’s warming. It’s us. We’re sure. It’s bad. But we can fix it.

UNDER THE SKY WE MAKE
by Kimberly Nicholas, PhD
Putnam, April 2021
(chez Neon Literary – voir catalogue)

After speaking to the international public for close to fifteen years about sustainability, climate scientist Dr. Nicholas realized that concerned people were getting the wrong message about the climate crisis. Yes, companies and governments are hugely responsible for the mess we’re in. But individuals CAN effect real, significant, and lasting change to solve this problem. Nicholas explores finding purpose in a warming world, combining her scientific expertise and her lived, personal experience in a way that seems fresh and deeply urgent: Agonizing over the climate costs of visiting loved ones overseas, how to find low-carbon love on Tinder, and even exploring her complicated family legacy involving supermarket turkeys. In her astonishing book UNDER THE SKY WE MAKE, Nicholas does for climate science what Michael Pollan did more than a decade ago for the food on our plate: offering a hopeful, clear-eyed, and somehow also hilarious guide to effecting real change, starting in our own lives. Saving ourselves from climate apocalypse will require radical shifts within each of us, to effect real change in our society and culture. But it can be done. It requires, Dr. Nicholas argues, belief in our own agency and value, alongside a deep understanding that no one will ever hand us power—we’re going to have to seize it for ourselves.

Dr. Kimberly Nicholas is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund, Sweden’s highest-ranked university. Born and raised on her family’s vineyard in Sonoma, California, she studied the effect of climate change on the California wine industry for her PhD in Environment and Resources at Stanford University. Since then, she has published over 50 articles on climate and sustainability in leading peer-reviewed journals, and her research has been featured in outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, USA Today, Buzzfeed and more. She has also been profiled in Elle and The Guardian, and gives appearances at around 50 lectures each year, such as the recent Climate Change Leadership summit.

I, WITNESS, collection dirigée par Dave Eggers & Zainab Nasrati

A landmark new nonfiction upper middle-grade series curated by literary legend Dave Eggers and International Youth Congress member Zainab Nasrati. Inspiring, engaging, and utterly absorbing, I, WITNESS gathers together the world’s foremost teen activists, writers and changemakers to tell their stories. Filled with accounts of extraordinary challenge from voices across the globe, it’s a one-of-a-kind series by the leaders of tomorrow—a rallying call to action, a praise song to youth resilience, and a testament to the incredible power of shared stories.

I, WITNESS Series
curated by Dave Eggers & Zainab Nasrati
Norton, Summer 2021
(chez Writers House – voir catalogue)

Book #1, ACCUSED, tells the story of Muslim-American activist Adama Bah, who, at the age of 16, was wrongly seized by the FBI on suspicion of being a suicide bomber. Her experience provides a riveting window into the damaging effects of racial profiling and post-9/11 discrimination. Book #2, HURRICAINE, is the astonishing account of Salvador Gómez-Colón, who raised over $160,000 for families devastated by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico (read more about Salvador here).
Books #3-4 tentatively to follow over the next 12 months.

The International Congress of Youth Voices was founded by Dave Eggers and Amanda Uhle and is an assembly of the world’s most exceptional teenage writers and activists. You can read more about the organization here.

 Dave Eggers is the acclaimed author of several books for adults and children, and is the winner of the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Education, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the TED Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His establishment of the International Congress of Youth Voices is a natural extension of his well-known activism including the founding of 826 National and his ongoing involvement with ScholarMatch. Dave and co-founder Amanda Uhle are working alongside Danish activist (and congress delegate) Zainab Nasrati to shape the series. Bestselling illustrator AG Ford will provide cover art for each book in the series in order to give it a unified look.

THE BLACK BOX de Paul Scharre

An award-winning defense expert tells the story of the new great power rivalry to control artificial intelligence—and how this powerful technology is shaping national power relationships and geopolitics in the 21st century.

THE BLACK BOX
by Paul Scharre
W.W. Norton, January 2023
(via Kaplan/Defiore Rights)

Artificial intelligence is bringing a new digital order—it is changing war, surveillance, and disinformation, with profound effects on human freedom, global security, and power dynamics. THE BLACK BOX takes us inside the immensely competitive global struggle to lead in the four key elements of AI advantage: data, computing power, talent, and institutions. A world expert in AI-enabled weapons, Paul Scharre examines the strengths and weaknesses of today’s major superpowers, including China, the United States, Europe, and the Big Tech corporations that control the global supply of data and compute.
With unique access to the world of automated warfare and surveillance—including on-site visits with major Chinese players and Pentagon startups—national security expert Paul Scharre guides readers through the alarming ways the AI revolution is reshaping the world, and the challenges democracies must overcome if they hope to maintain their global edge.

Paul Scharre is is the author of Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War, which won the 2019 Colby Award and was named one of Bill Gates’ top five books of 2018. A former Army Ranger, he is a senior fellow and director of the 20YY Future of Warfare Initiative at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), based in Washington, DC. From 2008 to 2013, he worked in the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense on policies for robotics, autonomy, and other emerging weapons technologies. He led the drafting of the official U.S. Department of Defense policy on autonomous weapons.

ALL THE FREQUENT TROUBLES OF OUR DAYS de Rebecca Donner

The true story of the extraordinary life and brutal death of Mildred Harnack, the American leader of the largest underground resistance group in Berlin who was executed on Hitler’s direct orders-uncovered by her great-great-niece in this riveting, deeply researched account.

ALL THE FREQUENT TROUBLES OF OUR DAYS:
The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler
by Rebecca Donner
Little, Brown, May 2021
(chez Sterling Lord Literistic)

What do you do when you suddenly find yourself confronted with a mortal threat to your society’s fundamental, stabilizing principles? Mildred Harnack chose to stand. Milwaukee-born, she was the leader of the largest anti-Nazi resistance group in Germany, and the only American woman to be put to death on Hitler’s orders. Despite its unmatched vastness, the record of World War II atrocity and nobility will forever remain incomplete. This ever-expanding volume of belligerence and courage is perhaps the most gravely gendered historical document we have; a war perpetrated, suffered and recounted by men. There are periodically polite acknowledgments of the roles played by woman in ‘aiding’ the war effort, but these usually have the hollow ring of tokenism. Mildred Harnack’s short but monumental life shows us just how incomplete that record remains. From 1933-42, with her German husband, Arvid, Mildred led a cell that couriered top secret military intelligence to the Allies, helped dissidents and persecuted minorities escape Germany, and distributed literature that encouraged civil disobedience and exposed Nazi plans. Fusing elements of biography, political thriller, and scholarly detective story, Harnack’s great-great-niece Rebecca Donner brilliantly interweaves family archives, original research, exclusive interviews with survivors, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, enthralling story, reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.

Rebecca Donner is the author of the novel, Sunset Terrace, and a graphic novel, Burnout. Her essays, reportage and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, Guernica, and other publications. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University.

SAVING TIME de Jenny Odell

A radical argument that we are living on the wrong clock—one that tells us time is money—and that there are other ways of experiencing time that offer bold, hopeful possibilities for ourselves and the planet from the New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing.

SAVING TIME:
Discovering A Life Beyond the Clock
by Jenny Odell
Random House, March 2023
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn’t built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it—the way we experience time itself—and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by–inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time–that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible.
In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful reframing of time, Jenny Odell takes us on a journey through other temporal habitats. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days, alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding. The stretchy quality of waiting and desire, the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory, the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy, or the time it takes to heal from injuries–physical or emotional. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life, to imagine a life, identity, and source of meaning outside of the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives–or the life of the planet–is not a foregone conclusion. In that sense, “saving” time—recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature—could also mean that time saves us.

JENNY ODELL is the author of How To Do Nothing, which was a NYT bestseller and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2019. Odell’s writing has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, The Believer, The Paris Review, and McSweeney’s. Her work as a visual artist has been exhibited locally and internationally. She teaches digital art at Stanford University.