Overview

"""A meditative and elegiac look at a country on the brink."" --PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Bestselling author David Gessner asks what kind of planet his daughter will inherit in this coast-to-coast guide to navigating climate crisis. The world is burning and the seas are rising. How do we navigate this new age of extremes? In A Traveler's Guide to the End of the World, David Gessner takes readers on an eye-opening tour of climate hotspots from the Gulf of Mexico to the burning American West to New York City to the fragile Outer Banks, where homes are being swallowed by the seas. He does so with his usual sense of humor, compassion, and a willingness to talk to anyone, providing an informative and sobering yet convivial guide for the age of fire, heat, wind, and water. Gessner approaches scientists and thinkers with a father's question: What will the world be like in 2064, when his daughter Hadley is his age now? What is the future of weather? The future of heat, storms, and fire?"

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9781948814812

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For nature-writing enthusiasts, Gessner needs no introduction. His books and essays have in many ways redefined what it means to write about the natural world, coaxing the genre from a staid, sometimes wonky practice to one that is lively and often raucous. --THE WASHINGTON POST David Gessner has been a font of creativity ever since the 1980s, when he published provocative political cartoons in that famous campus magazine, the Harvard Crimson. These days he's a naturalist, a professor and a master of the art of telling humorous and thought-provoking narratives about unusual people in out-of-the way-places. --THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE The Clash were called 'the only band that matters.' When it comes to climate, Gessner is the only writer who matters. Others write book reports on global warming, spewing statistics. Gessner immerses himself, gets to know the people most affected while telling their stories, writing from inside the crisis. --MARK SPITZER, author of Monster Fishing the World and Back

"""'Won't be water, but fire next time, ' goes the old apocalyptic Black spiritual that my grandmother used to scare me witless with when I was a kid. David Gessner's 'Guide, ' it turns out, brings her soothsayer singing close in, through the intimacy of friends and family. It is a different kind of reminder of our environmental predicament. A highly personalized accounting. I became a magpie peering over his literary shoulder, wondering if the usable air and water would run out before I could finish winding my way through the enraptured text. Though warmer and dirtier, it didn't and I'm happy for it, because his work is important reading. And he and my grandmother would disagree on one important point, it's gonna be water and fire, in our eventual end. The world will be alright, without us."" --J. DREW LANHAM, author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature ""A meditative and elegiac look at a country on the brink.""--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ""A veteran writer on the environment, Gessner evokes the havoc resulting from human-caused climate change by taking us to a host of melting, blazing, flooded or desiccated places... evocative prose and knowledgeable commentary."" --THE WASHINGTON POST ""David Gessner is perennially provocative, but never more so than in this fine volume, which asks us to actually think about and feel the world we are creating. It is an act of generational love and courage."" --BILL MCKIBBEN, author of The End of Nature ""David Gessner comes in hot with an indispensable contribution to our urgent conversation about how we should respond to the unprecedented environmental destruction our species has created. But this book is neither a bitter diatribe nor a dreary elegy. It is an engaging, entertaining, informative, unblinkingly honest look at the new world that climate change has wrought. Part poignant memoir, part adventurous travelogue, part accessible environmental science, this profound love letter to an uncertain future will forever change the way you imagine resilience, resistance, and transformation in the face of a rapidly changing planet."" --MICHAEL P. BRANCH, author of On the Trail of the Jackalope and Raising Wild ""Excellent environmental journalism.""--KIRKUS REVIEWS ""A highly readable, thought-provoking book."" --BOOK RIOT​""A Traveler's Guide is a highway road sign bedazzled with flashing-red lights that command us to halt--and to open our ears to what the earth is saying."" --WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS ""Gessner astutely tracks, guides, and plunges headfirst into the reality of climate change across our country in this visionary and crystalline portrait of how our world, our landscapes, and perhaps most importantly- our hearts, are forever altered."" --AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments ""In A Traveler's Guide to the End of the World, David Gessner, a self-described 'polygamist of place, ' bears powerful witness to the places he loves best, tracing the connections among their crises and finding possibility in their uncertain futures."" --MICHELLE NIJHUIS, author of Beloved Beasts ""In a sort of culmination of his writings to date, David Gessner invites us along on his journey to the end of the world as we know it. Visiting old friends and reacquainting himself with old (and very much changed) landmarks we see through his eyes, not just the changes wrought by current climate change but what happened in places like Chaco Canyon, Phoenix, and the Outer Banks hundreds of years ago. Yes, we've surely made a mess of things and yet, Gessner shows some possible ways forward and introduces us to people who are doing remarkable work. With his signature humor, Gessner manages to show us the worst while helping us hope for the best. Share this with your climate denial friends this year!"" --ANNE HOLMAN, The King's English Bookshop ""Resonant work. Drawing on personal experiences and conversations with affected communities, A Traveler's Guide to the End of the World issues moving warnings about future dangers while bearing witness to the precarious present."" --FOREWORD REVIEWS ""The Clash was called 'the only band that matters.' When it comes to climate, Gessner is the only writer who matters. Others write book reports on global warming, spewing statistics. Gessner immerses himself, gets to know the people most affected while telling their stories, writing from inside the crisis."" --MARK SPITZER, Author of Return of the Gar ""This is a work of astonishing and visionary scope but also sharply intimate and grounded detail. David Gessner's kaleidoscopic journey sweeps in mammoth forces of nature, seemingly uncontrollable forces in society and economy, and an utterly refreshing, almost heartbreaking faith in language, communication and the potential of the human word to save the human world."" --CONGRESSMAN JAMIE RASKIN ""Urgent but not panicked, this book is as personal and vulnerable as the world Gessner is describing. There are few better nature writers working these days, and even fewer who can convey both anger and possibility for the future in such a refined way."" --BRAD COSTA, Boulder Book Store ""With elements of dark humor that come flying like swallows going home, and with much beauty of detail, Gessner's journey becomes one of hoping to remember what's gone, writing a field guide to the life still present, as the reverent, remembering spirit of one human being."" --LINDA HOGAN, author of A History of Kindness"

"""For nature-writing enthusiasts, Gessner needs no introduction. His books and essays have in many ways redefined what it means to write about the natural world, coaxing the genre from a staid, sometimes wonky practice to one that is lively and often raucous."" --THE WASHINGTON POST ""David Gessner has been a font of creativity ever since the 1980s, when he published provocative political cartoons in that famous campus magazine, the Harvard Crimson. These days he's a naturalist, a professor and a master of the art of telling humorous and thought-provoking narratives about unusual people in out-of-the way-places."" --THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE ""The Clash were called 'the only band that matters.' When it comes to climate, Gessner is the only writer who matters. Others write book reports on global warming, spewing statistics. Gessner immerses himself, gets to know the people most affected while telling their stories, writing from inside the crisis."" --MARK SPITZER, author of Monster Fishing the World and Back"

Author Information

"For twenty-five years David Gessner has reported from climate hotspots, from the Gulf of Mexico during the BP oil spill to fracking towns and fires in the West to the fragile Outer Banks. He has been recognized for changing the face of nature writing, both in his own work and through the magazine he founded, Ecotone. Gessner is the author of twelve books that blend a love of nature, humor, memoir, and environmentalism, including the New York Times bestseller All the Wild That Remains, Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt's American Wilderness, and his latest, Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight: Sheltering with Thoreau in the Age of Crisis. A professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, his magazine publications include pieces in the New York Times Magazine, Sierra, Audubon, Orion, and many other magazines, and his prizes include a Pushcart Prize and the John Burroughs Award for Best Nature Essay for his essay ""Learning to Surf."" He has received the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment's award for best book of creative writing, and the Reed Award for Best Book on the Southern Environment. In 2017 he hosted the National Geographic Explorer show, ""The Call of the Wild."" He is married to the novelist Nina de Gramont."

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