William T. Vollmann is the author of ten novels, including Europe Central, which won the National Book Award. He has also written four collections of stories, including The Atlas, which won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a memoir, and six works of nonfiction, including Rising Up and Rising Down and Imperial, both of which were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His journalism and fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Harpers, Esquire, Granta, and many other publications.
Praise for No Immediate Danger:
“Carbon Ideologies is an almanac of global energy use . . . a
travelogue to natural landscapes riven by energy production . . . a
compassionate work of anthropology that tries to make sense of
man’s inability to weigh future cataclysm against short-term
comfort . . . one of the most honest books yet written on climate
change.” —Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic
“No Immediate Danger tussles with the comprehension-defying nature
of climate change . . . terrifying insights are to be found . . .
It embodies the confusion of our current moment, the insidiousness
of disbelief, and the mania-inducing reality that our greatest
threat is the hardest to act upon. It is a feverish, sprawling
archive of who we are, and what we’ve wrought.” —The Washington
Post
“In the face of complex, contested data, Vollmann is a diligent and
perceptive guide. He’s also deeply mindful of those who’ve been
sacrificed in the name of profits and political expediency. Amid
the Trump administration’s rollbacks of environment protections,
these are incontestably important books.” —The San Francisco
Chronicle
“Vollmann’s many fans . . . will not be disappointed . . . he packs
research and voice into his impassioned works . . . Reading these
two books did have an effect on me; I became even more conscious of
the resources I waste in my own life.” —John Schwartz, The New
York Times Book Review
“One of the enjoyable things about this massive work is the way
Vollmann employs irony, and that bluntest of irony called sarcasm,
throughout the volume. He can be quite humorous. You might even
call this the Infinite Jest of climate books . . . there’s
something admirable, even noble, about the sheer time and
effort—and sheer humanity—that went into these volumes.” —The
Baffler
“Equal parts gonzo journalism, hand-wringing confessional, and one
hot mess . . . the books document Vollmann’s quest to understand
how capitalism, consumerism, and fossil fuels are ruining the
planet.” —Sierra
“The best part of the books [are] the conversations Vollmann had
during his travels, the sensitive histories he gives of the places
he visited, and the moral impressions those conversations and
places have made on him. It’s these parts that made Carbon
Ideologies a unique, lasting, definitive contribution to the global
warming literature.” —The Humanist
“An elegy to our damned epoch that’s also a work of enlightenment
and education . . . the book is a performance of the vexations
involved in trying to understand our energy reality . . .
[Vollmann’s] project—not unlike that of his historical fiction—is
to show with utmost fidelity what it was like to be a human
involved in terrible things.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books
“[Provides] profound insights into both Japanese society and
universal themes regarding the human response to and preparation
for major disasters and tragedies.” —The International
Examiner
“Vigilant in his precision, open-mindedness, and candor, Vollmann
takes on global warming . . . [His] careful descriptions, touching
humility, molten irony, and rueful wit, combined with his
addressing readers in ‘the hot dark future,’ makes this compendium
of statistics, oral history, and reportage elucidating, compelling,
and profoundly disquieting.” —ALA Booklist (starred)
“[A] rewarding, impeccably researched narrative . . . Vollmann
apologizes to the future that we’ve ruined, charting how our
choices of energy sources made the planet scarcely inhabitable.”
—Kirkus Reviews
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