BookShelf

It’s a site of stunning natural beauty. It’s also the place with America’s worst income inequality. A new book details how Wyoming’s Teton County elite have, perhaps unwittingly, used their extreme wealth to remake the region through conservation easements and donations to environmental causes, but remain blind to the needs of the area’s poorer residents. The latest BookShelf review explains.

To better grasp how COVID-19 is linked to the persistent problem of polluted air, our latest BookShelf review recommends going back to a prescient text, “Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution.” While the volume predates the pandemic, it makes painfully clear why, during this crisis, healthy air matters more than ever.

If you’re looking for perspective in your reporting connected with the coronavirus story, it might help to turn to the extensive library of non-fiction books offering insight into disease and epidemics. Our own Bob Wyss offers a helping hand, with a select list of the most useful texts. Plus, links to resource lists for many more, in the latest BookShelf.

The Mekong River is a lifeline for millions and a biodiversity hotspot. But massive hydropower projects have put the Southeast Asian body of water, as well as the lives of the people and natural world around it, in serious jeopardy. In the latest BookShelf, writer Melody Kemp, who lives alongside the legendary river, reviews two volumes that help explain what’s killing the Mekong.

Sometimes in the face of bad news, it can help to laugh a little. That’s what award-winning environmental writer Craig Pittman may help readers do with his new dispatch from the Sunshine State. Our latest BookShelf reviews Pittman’s upcoming witty, truth-telling volume,“Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle To Save the Florida Panther.”

Water rights activist Maude Barlow eschews sanitized language to take on what she calls the “lords of water,” fighting global and local battles to turn communities “blue.” Barlow’s new book, “Whose Water Is It Anyway?: Taking Water Protection Into Public Hands” is the subject of our latest BookShelf review.

A new book, “Giants of the Monsoon Forest,” offers an intimate look at the lives of working elephants in conflict-ridden Myanmar, where one of the planet’s most majestic animals faces increasing pressures. BookShelf reviewer Melody Kemp, based in Laos, describes her own experience with elephants, their surprising history with man and hopeful possibilities for their future.

The Detroit River, a key Great Lakes shipping channel, was once the repository of millions of gallons of industrial discharge. But as a new book attests, Detroit’s industrial waterfront has in the last 50 years undergone a remarkable recovery that offers hope for the cleanup of other polluted Rust Belt towns. Read our BookShelf review.

The new book, “Superpower: One Man’s Quest to Transform American Energy,” takes what our reviewer calls an illuminating look into the politics and economics of energy development. The volume examines the decade-long effort to build long-distance transmission lines for wind-generated electricity. More in our latest BookShelf review.

Marine ecologist Drew Harvell’s new book makes the case that the world’s oceans are sick and that few are paying enough attention. According to our latest BookShelf review, her “Ocean Outbreak” takes readers on a panoramic journey through the deep, while equipping reporters to better report problems that go well beyond climate change.