With the approach of the annual Earth Day activities, we offer 12 big picture books on biodiversity, oceans, food, and waste.
For April’s bookshelf we take a cue from Earth Day and step back to look at the bigger picture. It wasn’t climate change that motivated people to attend the teach-ins and protests that marked that first observance in 1970; it was pollution, the destruction of wild lands and habitats, and the consequent deaths of species.
The earliest Earth Days raised awareness, led to passage of new laws, and spurred conservation. But the original problems are still with us. And now they intersect with climate change, making it impossible to address one problem without affecting the others.
Books ready for free download this year include today’s release of Keiichiro Hirano’s bestseller in Tokyo, ‘At the End of the Matinee.’
‘This Complex Diversity’
The author of
At the End of the Matinee leans in and sports a slightly impish smile when he hears a question he likes to answer.
Better in English than he gives himself credit for being, Keiichiro Hirano, has heard the phrase “language of relationships” in an interview with
Publishing Perspectives from his home in Japan. He’s being asked through interpreter Beth Cary about the modulating personalities in his books–intelligent, shifting souls who seem to surprise themselves as much as his readers as they move from one guise to another.
Murdering minorities
April 15, 2021
In a bold and defiant recent book, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto (2019), Suketu Mehta has written a deeply erudite defence of global migrants and refugees who roam the globe and make the cruel wheels of predatory capitalism run their cycles.
Mehta begins his book with the story of his own grandfather sitting in a park in a suburb of London when a nasty old racist “white man” – an avid reader of Rudyard Kipling no doubt – approaches him and wags his finger at him demanding to know why he was in “his country”. “Because we are the creditors,” responds Mehta’s magnificent grandfather, who was born in India worked all his life in colonial Kenya and had retired in London, “We are here, because you were there.”
(Tor Teen 978-1-250-31731-5, $15.99, 288pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, April 13, 2021)
A young-adult SF novel and the first in the Unstoppable trilogy, centering around a sleeper-agent alien teenager on Earth whose part in an intergalactic war is bigger than she thinks.
“It’s properly, wickedly exciting – I devoured it! How Anders packs so much power and energy into her prose is astonishing. These characters – and the adrenalin, the sheer excitement- will live on in my head long after the last page. Glorious. And the most amazing thing of all is her imagination – to think of a new evil superpower for a villain should be impossible. Completely impossible. Everything’s been done, every sodding thing. Until this arrives. Dazzling. Horrifying. GENIUS. A beautiful book. I loved it, can you tell?!”
What Do Memes Tell Us about Self and Time during the Pandemic? contexts.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from contexts.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.