Race for Tomorrow by Simon Mundy [9/10]

I have read more than a few eyewitness-to-climate-change books over the last decade. It is no exaggeration to say that “Race for Tomorrow: Survival, Innovation and Profit on the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis” is the most engrossing and revelatory. Simon Mundy, a Financial Times journalist, has used his august newspaper’s cachet to roam the world over two years and tell human stories that encapsulate the terror and hope of these climate crisis times. Mundy walks over melting, collapsing Siberian steppes, talks to citizens of the Maldives and the Solomon Islands dealing with washed-away residences, chats with front-line inventors, investigates the illegal Amazon forest clearers and their victims, hears from reinsurers, travels through drying-up Ethiopia, views Greenland’s retreating glaciers, and talks to Chilean winemakers tweaking vineyard locations. Six continents and twenty-six countries, and dozens of interlocked narratives. Mundy is an exuberant, precise stylist who renders every chapter an investigative triumph, and his special talent is for finding people-oriented stories that not only enthrall or appall but are very, very human. Race for Tomorrow is spellbinding, essential reading at the beginning of our most crucial decade.