Outstanding Academic Titles 2024: Earth Day

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to English literature

Posted on April 25, 2025 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles focused on the Earth and climate change. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. Climate change and international history: negotiating science, global change, and environmental justice
Morgan, Ruth A. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024

Amid the proliferation of climate change literature, Ruth Morgan’s Climate Change and International History stands out. In this readable and engaging work, Morgan has succeeded in the ambitious task of parsing a massive literature spanning the history of science, environmental politics, and international history to demonstrate how climate science and international events coproduced one another, both facilitating and constraining contemporary policy responses. Morgan devotes specific attention to the meanings, uses of, and contests over climate science and policies following World War II. Eight chronologically ordered chapters each open with a number—the rising atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide—a nod to Morgan’s conclusion that the focus on climate change as a problem to be understood, governed, and solved by technical experts and international institutions has both under- and overestimated the roles of those actors while enabling other actors to “invoke and enroll” climate change for other ends, including environmental justice and economic development. View on Amazon

2. The Earth transformed: an untold history
Frankopan, Peter. Knopf, 2023

The Earth Transformed is an engaging and insightful work examining the centrality of climate to global history. Frankopan (global history, Univ. of Oxford, UK) covers the entirety of human history, successfully using a Big History framework to explain how the environment has been a constant in shaping world history. Such a sweeping overview can have its limitations, but by focusing on climate Frankopan provides specific examples that provide depth as well as a truly global scope. Indeed, although many environmental histories explain how humanity has altered, exploited, or damaged the environment, climate offers a comprehensive approach without avoiding humanity’s role in changing the Earth. The work begins by exploring environmental factors in human evolution, followed by the emergence of societies, agriculture, cities, religions, and empires. These earlier chapters are particularly useful given how much scholarship is dedicated to the modern period. The second half of the book examines topics after 1500, throughout which Frankopan retains a strong global dimension.  View on Amazon

3. Extinctions: from dinosaurs to you
Benton, Michael J. Thames & Hudson, 2023

Apocalyptic natural disasters have become common themes in entertainment. The story always ends with a few clever humans that have just the right mix of compassion, technological innovation, and/or hidden superpowers to save the planet from a biblical disaster. Extinction is considered something that happens to the natural world, not to the appointed stewards of this planet. Humans all share a hauteur of nature and are confident in their ability to technologically innovate their way out of disaster. Benton (Univ. of Bristol, England) paints a lucid picture of one of the most interesting aspects of the history of life on earth: extinction. He offers a well-written, concise, and accurate narrative. If the public wishes to educate itself about environmental issues and the impact they may have on human survival, and wants to be able to intelligently discuss those issues, this book is a good starting point. It offers an ideal short course, providing foundational information that everyone needs to make some sense of what extinction may mean for humankind. View on Amazon

4. Saving a rainforest and losing the world: conservation and displacement in the global tropics
Thaler, Gregory M. Yale, 2024

Sustainable development is a goal of many environmentalists, particularly those working in tropical latitudes. The idea is that while the US may have nearly deforested a continent, it need not be that way. According to Thaler (International Affairs, Univ. of Georgia), it probably is that way. Capitalism incentivizes habitat destruction through extraction of resources in underdeveloped economies and conversion of those raw materials into marketable products in developed economies (or in the case of most of the tropics, in developed northern countries). The idea of “land sparing” through investment in intensive agriculture as a way of relieving pressure on virgin forest is similarly an idea that sounds good but doesn’t work in practice. Through interviews and extensive fieldwork, Thaler provides evidence that our wishful thinking doesn’t make it so. His most memorable visual is that of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Nobody ever asks what is at the other end of the rainbow. That’s where capitalist-driven ecocide occurs.  View on Amazon.

5. Under fire and under water: wildfire, flooding, and the fight for climate resilience in the American West
Cain, Bruce E. Oklahoma, 2023

As a part of a relatively new category of research into why climate change is so hard to mitigate, Cain (political science, Stanford Univ.) offers a scholarly investigation into how social and political polarization complicates solving climate problems. Cain focuses on the American West, where the presence of special interests and the difficulty of agreement and compromise among political constituencies make climate change action increasingly hard to achieve. Chapter 1 summarizes the roles physical geography, energy production, governmental influences, and crises play in environmental problem-solving and policy making. Chapter 2 explores the evolution of water as a policy issue in the western interior. Water management has multiple constituencies seeking to control and benefit from scarce resources, and policies haven’t evolved to reflect social and economic change. Chapter 3 adds the complexity of wildfire to partisan approaches to resource management. Chapter 4 presents the dilemma of coastal population centers having too much water due to rising sea levels. Chapter 5 synthesizes the challenges of seeking solutions to increasingly immediate crises. Ultimately, local and regional constituencies in crisis require recognition and compromise from elsewhere and from multiple levels of government. View on Amazon.

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