Search results for ""author nathaniel rich""

The old distinctions - between natural and artificial, dystopia and utopia, science fiction and science fact - have blurred, losing all meaning. We inhabit an uncanny landscape of our own creation. From Odds Against Tomorrow to Losing Earth to the film Dark Waters (adapted from the first chapter of this book), Nathaniel Rich's stories and reporting have come to define the way we think of contemporary ecological narrative. In Second Nature, he asks what it means to live in an era of terrible responsibility. The question is no longer, How do we return to the world that we've lost? It is, What world do we want to create in its place?

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New Orleans, 1918. The birth of jazz, the Spanish flu, an axe murderer on the loose. The lives of a traumatized cop, a conflicted Mafia matriarch, and a brilliant trumpeter converge. In Nathaniel Rich's King Zeno, the Crescent City gets the rich, dark, sweeping novel it so deserves.New Orleans, a century ago: a city determined to reshape its destiny and, with it, the nation’s. Downtown, a new American music is born. In Storyville, prostitution is outlawed and the police retake the streets with maximum violence. In the Ninth Ward, laborers break ground on a gigantic canal that will split the city, a work of staggering human ingenuity intended to restore New Orleans’s faded mercantile glory. The war is ending and a prosperous new age dawns. But everything is thrown into chaos by a series of murders committed by an axe-wielding maniac with a peculiar taste in music.The axe murders scramble the fates of three people from different corners of town. Detective William Bastrop is an army veteran haunted by an act of wartime cowardice, recklessly bent on redemption. Isadore Zeno is a jazz cornetist with a dangerous side hustle. Beatrice Vizzini is the widow of a crime boss who yearns to take the family business straight. Each nurtures private dreams of worldly glory and eternal life, their ambitions carrying them into dark territories of obsession, paranoia, and madness.In New Orleans, a city built on swamp, nothing stays buried long.

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Nathaniel Rich is the author of two previous novels, Odds Against Tomorrow and The Mayor's Tongue, and a work of nonfiction, Losing Earth: A Recent History. His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney's, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and VICE, and he is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine. He lives in New Orleans.

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‘Nathaniel Rich’s account starts in Washington in the 1990s and tells the story of how climate change could have been stopped back then, if only the powerful had acted. But they didn’t want to.’ – Observer By 1979, we knew all that we know now about the science of climate change – what was happening, why it was happening, and how to stop it. Over the next ten years, we had the very real opportunity to stop it. Obviously, we failed. Nathaniel Rich tells the essential story of why and how, thanks to the actions of politicians and businessmen, that failure came about. It is crucial to an understanding of where we are today. ‘The excellent and appalling Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich describes how close we came in the 70s to dealing with the causes of global warming and how US big business and Reaganite politicians in the 80s ensured it didn’t happen. Read it.’ – John Simpson ‘An eloquent science history, and an urgent eleventh-hour call to save what can be saved.’ – Nature ‘To change the future, we must first understand our past, and Losing Earth is a crucial part of that when it comes to the environmental battles we’re facing.’– Stylist

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