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Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out.
Bill McKibben's groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist, new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to bleach away the variety of human experience. Falter tells the story of these converging trends and of the ideological fervor that keeps us from bringing them under control. And then, drawing on McKibben's experience in building 350.org, the first truly global citizens movement to combat climate change, it offers some possible ways out of the trap. We're at a bleak moment in human history -- and we'll either confront that bleakness or watch the civilization our forebears built slip away.Bill McKibben is the author of more than a dozen books, including the best sellers Falter, Deep Economy, and The End of Nature, which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis.
He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and the winner of the Gandhi Prize, the Thomas Merton Prize, and the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called "the alternate Nobel." He lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern. He founded the global grassroots climate campaign 350.org; his new project, organizing people over sixty for progressive change, is called Third Act."He has gathered the most vivid statistics, distilled history to its juiciest turns, and made the case as urgently and clearly as can be: The whole breadth of our existence--the 'human game'--is in jeopardy." --The Washington Post
"[An] unsettling look at the prospects for human survival. . . . Readers open to inconvenient and sobering truths will find much to digest in McKibben's eloquently unsparing treatise." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A compelling call for change." --Kirkus Reviews "[A] deeply caring, eloquently reasoned inquiry into environmental and techno-utopian threats. . . . Profoundly compelling and enlightening, McKibben balances alarm with hope." --Booklist (starred review) "McKibben provides a fresh perspective with surprising examples and an engaging writing style." --Jared Diamond, The New York Times Book Review "[A] lyrical masterpiece . . . [and] a humane and wise book, even a beautiful one, if that's not oxymoronic, given its subject . . . Falter provides ample evidence that we are on the cusp of an avoidable disaster." --Los Angeles Review of Books "Fascinating. . . McKibben is a mighty orator on the page here, just as he was in The End of Nature (1989) and Eaarth (2010), and his call for creating more compassionate and equitable societies is inspiring." --Pacific Standard "Falter is McKibben's most powerfully argued book, and maybe his most important since The End of Nature 30 years ago. . . . It affirms him as among a very few of our most compelling truth-tellers about the climate catastrophe and the ideological forces driving it." --Wen Stephenson, The Nation "Falter is the work of one of America's most skillful long-form journalists. . . . [McKibben has] an uncannily entertaining way of combining information with interpretation and insight." --Seven Days "A deeply reported, broad-spanning investigation. . . . Compelling." --Outside "McKibben, a veteran environmental writer, is never hectoring or hyperbolic; here, he turns the possibility of human extinction (from climate change, artificial intelligence, etc.) into an absorbing analysis with a glimmer of hope." --The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice "Falter is a book about which it would be impossible to say too much. . . . McKibben has positioned himself on the cutting edge of history." --The Progressive "The strength of [McKibben's] writing on climate change is that its specificity burns away the mist from what, to most people, is a hazy issue." --The Times (London) "Falter is a bracing call to arms, one that concerned readers ignore at their peril." --Palo Alto Weekly "A love letter, a plea, a eulogy, and a prayer. This is Bill McKibben at his glorious best. Wise and warning, with everything on the line. Do not miss it."--Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine