Two National Book Awards finalists take on climate extremes

NPR's Book of the Day

NPR

Arts, Books

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2023

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today's episode features interviews with two authors whose works are 2023 National Book Awards finalists — one fiction, one nonfiction. Both broach the topic of climate realities, though their books take place hundreds of years apart. First, NPR's Scott Simon chats with Hanna Pylväinen about The End of Drum-Time, which opens with a startling earthquake and centers an 1850s community of native Sámi reindeer herders in the Scandinavian Arctic. Then, Here & Now's Peter O'Dowd asks journalist John Vaillant about Fire Weather, which covers the 2016 wildfires in Fort McMurray, Canada.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. You know, NPR's books we love isn't just a
0:09.2	collection of our favorite books of the year. It's a snapshot of what people were writing and what we
0:14.2	as readers were responding to throughout the year. And it's interesting to sort of draw links
0:18.6	between books that seemingly have nothing to do with each other.
0:22.1	For instance, take the two books we're bringing you today. In a bit, we'll hear some in-depth reporting
0:26.4	about the 2016 wildfires in Alberta, Canada, and what these huge fires say about our response
0:32.4	to climate change. But first, Hannah Pilvinan talks to NPR Scott Simon about her book, The End of Drum Time,
0:38.8	which is about a Lutheran minister trying to convert a group of Scandinavian people in 1851.
0:44.7	Now, you might be wondering, what does that have to do with Canadian fires in 2016?
0:51.5	But both books deal with people trying to wrap their head around these huge disasters
0:57.3	and how confronting these, you know, acts of God can mean challenging your entire reason of being.
1:04.7	That's after the break.
1:06.4	The end of drumtime opens with an earthquake. It shakes a small town in the Scandinavian tundra in 1851,
1:14.0	while a Lutheran minister named Lars Levy, also known as Mad Lassie, is holding forth to his congregation of reindeer herders and their families.
1:22.8	Let's ask Hannah Pilvin, the author of this novel, to bring us there.
1:29.6	The shaking stopped and the floor stilled, but the children screamed, and their mothers tried to still their screaming, and the men
1:34.6	alternately laughed and shouted their fear. Lars Levy was filled mostly with amazement. Hadn't this
1:41.1	happened when Christ had died? Hadn't God sent an earthquake to mark the moment of his sacrifice?
1:47.3	The force of this realization nearly made Lars Levi fall to his own knees.
1:52.2	He looked at his congregants, his parishioners, his reindeer skittish on the snow,
1:57.2	and he saw them multiply before him, ten upon ten,
2:02.7	so that the back of the church was not littered with drunks who stink of their drinking, but instead each face shone clean and each
	...

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