BookShelf

BookShelf banner

 

The BookShelf features monthly reviews of the latest environmental and energy books of interest to journalists, as well as an occasional question-and-answer in which published authors offer insight into the motivations behind their work and provide advice to environmental reporters and writers.

For questions and comments, or to suggest future BookShelf reviews, or to offer to review a book, email the SEJournal BookShelf Editor Tom Henry at thenry@theblade.com.


April 21, 2021

March 24, 2021

  • Bears are incredibly complex animals with much to teach humans, writes the author of a new volume on grizzlies, black and polar bears. Our BookShelf review calls the text, which also integrates striking photographs, highly scientific yet accessible, and suggests it might go a long way to helping not just to understand bears, but improve their odds of survival.

February 24, 2021

January 27, 2021

December 16, 2020

  • It’s been a half-century since the first Earth Day in 1970 and a new book from an old hand catalogues the advances and the setbacks in the decades since. BookShelf contributor Francesca Lyman reviews “You Can’t Fool Mother Nature: The Once and Future Triumph of Environmentalism,” and explores how a long view from a veteran environmentalist informs the field of environmental reporting.

November 11, 2020

  • The memorable career of California Gov. Jerry Brown has at its core a spiritual connection to the environment, a connection that he successfully channeled into the political realm, particularly around climate change. That’s according to the writer of a new biography that delves into the origins of Brown’s environmental politics and his climate change legacy. Read our latest BookShelf review.

October 14, 2020

  • With the heart of a naturalist, the head of a scientist and the weary bones of someone watching the destruction of the natural world, a prize-winning writer shares insights into the environment … and into a mind shaped by autism. That writer, by the way, is just 16 years old. BookShelf’s Melody Kemp reviews “Diary of a Young Naturalist.” 

September 16, 2020

  • Bird brains, despite the dictum, are anything but deficient. In fact, a new book by science and nature writer Jennifer Ackerman reveals how scientists, driven by rising diversity in their own ranks and by the leverage of new technologies, are gaining a dramatically new understanding of the complexities of bird behavior. BookShelf has a review of “The Bird Way.”

July 15, 2020

June 17, 2020

  • 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.

Pages