The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet -- Jeff Goodell, Hardcover

Most Anticipated by The New York Times and The Washington Post- New York Times bestselling journalist's "masterful, bracing" (David Wallace-Wells) investigation exposes "through stellar reporting, artful storytelling and fascinating scientific explanations" (Naomi Klein) an explosive new understanding of heat and the impact that rising temperatures will have on our lives and on our planet. "Entertaining and thoroughly researched," (Al Gore), it will completely change the way you see the world, and despite its urgent themes, is injected with "eternal optimism" (Michael Mann) on how to combat one of the most important issues of our time.

"When heat comes, it's invisible. It doesn't bend tree branches or blow hair across your face to let you know it's arrived.... The sun feels like the barrel of a gun pointed at you."

The world is waking up to a new reality: wildfires are now seasonal in California, the Northeast is getting less and less snow each winter, and the ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctica are melting fast. Heat is the first order threat that drives all other impacts of the climate crisis. And as the temperature rises, it is revealing fault lines in our governments, our politics, our economy, and our values. The basic science is not complicated: Stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, and the global temperature will stop rising tomorrow. Stop burning fossil fuels in 50 years, and the temperature will keep rising for 50 years, making parts of our planet virtually uninhabitable. It's up to us. The hotter it gets, the deeper and wider our fault lines will open.

The Heat Will Kill You First is about the extreme ways in which our planet is already changing. It is about why spring is coming a few weeks earlier and fall is coming a few weeks later and the impact that will have on everything from our food supply to disease outbreaks. It is about what will happen to our lives and our communities when typical summer days in Chicago or Boston go from 90 F to 110 F. A heatwave, Goodell explains, is a predatory event-- one that culls out the most vulnerable people. But that is changing. As heatwaves become more intense and more common, they will become more democratic.

As an award-winning journalist who has been at the forefront of environmental journalism for decades, Goodell's new book may be his most provocative yet, explaining how extreme heat will dramatically change the world as we know it. Masterfully reported, mixing the latest scientific insight with on-the-ground storytelling, Jeff Goodell tackles the big questions and uncovers how extreme heat is a force beyond anything we have reckoned with before.


Author: Jeff Goodell
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Published: 07/11/2023
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.33lbs
Size: 9.50h x 6.39w x 1.28d
ISBN: 9780316497572

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/24/2023
Kirkus Reviews 05/01/2023

About the Author
Jeff Goodell is a New York Times bestselling of author of seven books, including The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World, which was picked as a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2017, as well as one of Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2017. Goodell's previous books include Sunnyvale, a memoir about growing up in Silicon Valley, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and Big Coal: the Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future. He is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he has covered climate change for more than a decade.