Who We Are and What We Do

Welcome to Climate Book Reviews! We’re glad you’re here!

We started this site to provide a clearinghouse of reviews of books about climate change. As climate change accelerates and more people seek information about the health of the planet, there needed to be a place where people could go to discover and screen different types of climate books. While we won’t be able to review every book, our little eco-minds will search far and wide to find the best books that will capture your imagination and, we hope, move you to act. We have no restrictions on genres, political points of view, or degree of popularity. We just want to curate for you some books worth knowing about.

Our site is divided into three primary parts:

  1. CBR Reviews: These are book reviews by our experts and staff.
  2. External Reviews: These are posts that direct you to reviews from news outlets and book review sites.
  3. Podcast: Every quarter, we will publish a podcast review of climate books.

The heart and soul of our site is the podcast, but because we all have careers, we simply can’t produce them as frequently as we’d like. Published quarterly, it will evolve as we discern what most matters to our audience. In the intervening weeks, we’ll publish reviews written by our staff and by experts that we solicit for content. Because so many books are coming out, we are also pointing you to reviews by other outlets. The goal here is to equip you with the best information out there and to curate an ongoing and diverse set of books for you. You’ll find books from around the world, some targeted to general readers, some aimed at fiction readers or lovers or poetry, some published in other countries, and some primarily for academics. We hope the range will not only encourage you to seek out new work and types of writing, but to get a sense of exactly how pressing this issue is.

The book market is crowded, and as large publishers compete with each other to capture very specific demographics, they have to make choices based on shareholders’ yearnings for endlessly growing profits. As a result, the biggest publishers can produce only very limited offerings about climate change. Rather famously within the industry, even Bill Gates well-considered and well-reviewed book failed to meet sales expectations despite general agreement that it was an important contribution. As a result, some of the best books are coming from independent publishers and university presses, and they are making a big impact in our world. We hope to make those works visible to you, even as we will do our best to review or link you to reviews for some of the big titles that the “bottom line” publishers push out into the market.

We do not and will not review books in return for any consideration by a publisher, author, or organization, so you can trust our reviews are honest. We will be frank about our assessment of any work we review. If we love it, we’ll say so. If we have reservations, we’ll say so. If we really dislike it, we’ll say so, even if in kind words. And if we have relationships with the author, the people written about, or the publisher, we’ll confess that up front so you know of any possible conflicts of interest. Our podcast team features Ed Whittingham, Roger Thompson, and AJ Letterel. Roger also runs the site and manages our team of reviewers. If you have any questions or concerns about the content here, please feel free to leave a comment below.

Who We Are

Roger Thompson is a professor and writer at Stony Brook University. He began his career working with environmental literature and nature writing and established with Ed Whittingham an environmental internship program in Banff, Alberta for students at a VMI, a military college. HIs most recent environmental book, No Word for Wilderness: Italy’s Grizzlies and the Race to Save the Rarest Bears on Earth (Ashland Creek), documents the attempts by grassroots activists and university faculty to preserve the Marsican bears of Abruzzo, and it reveals for the first time the mafia’s attempts to use National Parks to fleece EU subsidies.
Ed Whittingham is a public policy professional who advises clients on clean energy, climate change and industrial decarbonization. His past and present clients span the renewable power, heavy industry and cleantech sectors. He is the co-host of Energy vs Climate, Canada’s most popular podcast on how climate change is reshaping our energy systems. He is also a fellow with the Public Policy Forum and a mentor with the Creative Destruction Lab.
Ed is the former executive director of the Pembina Institute, a past director of the Alberta Energy Regulator, and a past member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Oil and Gas and Royal Dutch Shell’s External Review Committee. In 2016 Ed was named one of Alberta’s 50 Most Influential People by Alberta Venture magazine. His op-eds have been published in newspapers and magazines across Canada and internationally. 
Mario Henao is a Professional in Literary Studies from the National University of Colombia. He has a Master’s Degree in Argentine and Latin American Film and Theater Studies from the University of Buenos Aires. He is currently pursuing doctoral studies at Stony Brook University and is a book reviewer for CBR.