BERKELEY ARTS & LETTERS: Nathaniel Rich / Losing Earth: A Recent History

Berkeley Arts & Letters presents Nathaniel Rich for his new book Losing Earth: A Recent History, based on the New York Times Magazine special issue “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” also currently in development as a TV series by Apple and Anonymous Content. Join us for the one Bay Area chance to see the author present the most urgent story of our times, brilliantly reframed and beautifully told, live and in person.

Please note: This event is ticketed, and will take place at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley. Tickets, including discounted book bundles, are available in advance here. Unless otherwise noted here, general admission tickets will be available at the door.

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 Hiroshima and 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.

Nathaniel Rich is the author of the novels King Zeno, Odds Against Tomorrow, and The Mayor’s Tongue. He is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books. He lives in New Orleans.

Please note:

–  Duration of event is subject to author’s preference.

–  Signing and additional details coming soon.

–  This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.

–  If you cannot attend the event but would like to request a signed copy of Losing Earth, and/or any of Nat’s books, order below and put your request in the comments field.

–  RSVP appreciated but not required.