The best environmental books we’ve read in 2024
We published 30 book reviews this year and read many more. And out of all the books we’ve read, here are a handful of our favorites. You’ll find a mix …
Simon & Schuster
Book Review: Soil, The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
by Camille T. Dungy Simon& Schuster, 2023 During racial segregation in the South, florists refused to sell flowers to Black people.[1] In Soil, The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, …
Eco-Fiction, Edited by John Stadler
The stories in Eco-Fiction, most written in the mid-20th century, are by very well-known authors. Some are sci-fi, some are dated, and others are sadly prescient, such as Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” which makes the connection between authoritarianism and ecological disaster.
Book Review: FELLOWSHIP POINT by Alice Elliott Dark
Alice Elliott Dark’s beautiful, sprawling novel Fellowship Point is about land and stewardship, about nature and conservation, but more than that, it is a book of friendship across the decades …
Book Review: THE HIGH HOUSE by Jessie Greengrass
While Jessie Greengrass’s remarkable novel The High House is set primarily in a grim future, this is not purely dystopian fiction—in fact, it feels far more contemporary, like a novel …
Book Review: Ash Davidson’s Damnation Spring
Living in Southern Oregon, not far north of where Ash Davidson’s Damnation Spring is set, I’ve grown used to passing trucks that are overloaded with timber, and mountainsides bare from clear-cuts. Knowing …
Book Review: Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica (translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses)
In Tender is the Flesh, Agustina Bazterrica expertly crafts a horrifying reality that feels too contemporary to be the future. A virus has decimated the world’s animal population. Societies around …
Book Review: The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals by Becky Mandelbaum
While the title of Becky Mandelbaum’s The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals may indicate this is a novel about animals, it is very much more a human novel. Set primarily …
The best environmental books we’ve read in 2016
I polled our contributors to see what books they’ll remember best from 2016. And here we have it — some of which we’ve reviewed and some of which we hope …
Barkskins by Annie Proulx: An epic (and ongoing) story of extraction
Barkskins: A Novel Barkskins tells the intertwined and intergenerational stories of the natives and immigrants of the North American territory once known as New France. Because this novel takes place over more …
