"Wake up! Act! A call to address global climate change from two masters of science fiction. Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl are among the greatest science fiction writers who ever lived. Their talent for envisioning the future, and their clarity in writing about that future, made their novels enduring classics. In Our angry Earth, they applied those skills to a careful survey of the state of Planet Earth and the probable effect of our carbon-burning culture on it. Their cleared-eyed call to action is as fresh and timely as it was twenty-five years ago, when this book was published. The new introduction and afterword by Kim Stanley Robinson bring the book completely up to date. Robinson is one of the greatest modern SF writers, author of the bestselling Mars trilogy, the New York Times bestselling 2312, and the current climate change-focused bestseller New York 2140. He has written fiction and nonfiction about climate change for the past thirty years. In 2008, Time named Robinson a "Hero of the Environment."--Page 4 of cover.

Overview: Celebrated novelist David Treuer has gained a reputation for writing fiction that expands the horizons of Native American literature. In Rez Life, his first full-length work of nonfiction, Treuer brings a novelist's storytelling skill and an eye for detail to a complex and subtle examination of Native American reservation life, past and present. With authoritative research and reportage, Treuer illuminates misunderstood contemporary issues like sovereignty, treaty rights, and natural-resource conservation. He traces the convoluted waves of public policy that have deracinated, disenfranchised, and exploited Native Americans, exposing the tension and conflict that has marked the historical relationship between the United States government and the Native American population. Through the eyes of students, teachers, government administrators, lawyers, and tribal court judges, he shows how casinos, tribal government, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have transformed the landscape of Native American life. A member of the Ojibwe of northern Minnesota, Treuer grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation, but was educated in "mainstream" America. Treuer traverses the boundaries of American and Indian identity as he explores crime and poverty, casinos and wealth, and the preservation of his native language and culture. Rez Life is a strikingly original work of history and reportage, a must read for anyone interested in the Native American story.

A novel focus on "personal responsibility" has transformed political thought and public policy in America and Europe. Since the 1970s, responsibility--which once meant the moral duty to help and support others--has come to suggest an obligation to be self-sufficient. This narrow conception of responsibility has guided recent reforms of the welfare state, making key entitlements conditional on good behavior. Drawing on intellectual history, political theory, and moral philosophy, Yascha Mounk shows why the Age of Responsibility is pernicious--and how it might be overcome. Mounk shows that today's focus on individual culpability is both wrong and counterproductive: it distracts us from the larger economic forces determining aggregate outcomes, ignores what we owe our fellow citizens regardless of their choices, and blinds us to other key values, such as the desire to live in a society of equals. Recognizing that even society's neediest members seek to exercise genuine agency, Mounk builds a positive conception of responsibility. Instead of punishing individuals for their past choices, he argues, public policy should aim to empower them to take responsibility for themselves--and those around them.--

An Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and a mystery novelist, Roger L. Simon is the only American writer to pull off the amazing trick of being profiled positively in both Mother Jones and National Review in one lifetime. The stunning story of his political odyssey is told in this memoir, where Simon recounts his migration from financier of the Black Panther Breakfast Program to pioneer blogosphere mogul beloved by the right as a 9/11 Democrat. But Simon is beholden to neither right nor left in this tale of Hollywood chic run amuck, as he talks out of school about his adventures with, among many others, Richard Pryor, Warren Beatty, Timothy Leary, Richard Dreyfuss, Woody Allen, and Julian Semyonov, the Soviet Union's version of Robert Ludlum and also a KGB colonel who tempted Simon to join the KGB himself. Among the topics covered along the way: Is there a new blacklist in Hollywood, this one targeting conservatives? Simon's red-carpet tours of the People's Republic of China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union with Hollywood screenwriters and famous mystery novelists. Why Al Gore's documentary on global warming didn't deserve the Oscar on artistic grounds alone; and why the Academy's voting system is so corrupt. And, as they say, there is much, much more besides.

Life Out of Context begins as a powerful, brooding and humorously honest examination of Mosley's own sense of cultural dislocation as an African American writer. But due to a series of serendipitous events -- the screening of a documentary about Africa, an encounter with Harry Belafonte and Hugh Masakela -- Mosley, rather like the protagonist in one of his mystery novels, has a series of epiphanies on the role of a black intellectual in America. He asks: What can we do to fight injustice, poverty, exploitation, and racism? What is globalization doing to us? Through these late night meditations, Mosley attempts to transcend his earlier feelings of living a "life out of context" and seeks instead to find a political context. He ends with a call to arms, proposing that African Americans have to break their historic ties with the Democrat Party, and form a party of their own.