This is the Book Review Podcast and I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book

Review.

I'm recording this on Monday, July 24th, and this has been a scary summer, weather-wise,

temperature-wise.

It has been reported that the last several weeks were likely the hottest weeks in Earth's

recorded history.

Recently, a heat wave descended simultaneously upon the United States, several European

countries, and parts of China.

Books about climate change have become their own cottage industry, and appropriately

so given the reality of the world before us.

This overheated summer, we've reviewed several of those books at the Book Review.

In Fire Weather, a true story from a hotter world, John Valiant tells the tale of the

massive 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, one of the many predecessors to the blazes consuming

parts of Canada this summer.

There's the parrot and the igloo, climate and the signs of denial, in which David Lipsky

sketches a soup to not saga of how he got here.

Incidentally, the book takes its title from a New York Times story from 1956, 1956, headlined

warmer climate on the Earth, maybe due to more carbon dioxide in the air.

And then there is the heat we'll kill you first, life and death on a scorched planet by

Jeff Gidell.

Gidell, who previously wrote the book The Water Will Come, Rising Seas, Sinking Cities,

and the Remaking of the Civilized World, lays out the many ways in which rising temperatures

...