Books

New in 2011

The View from Lazy Point (Henry Holt & Co - Jan.)
&
A Sea in Flames (Crown Publishing - April)

by Carl Safina

The View from Lazy Point; A Natural Year in an Unnatural World. In this intertwined story , Carl Safina shows us that nature and human dignity require each other. The View from Lazy Point follows the arc of the seasons from Carl Safina's home waters of eastern Long Island to far horizons of the globe, from the Arctic to Antarctica and across the tropics. We encounter bears, Eskimos, salmon, penguins, corals, tropical fishes, local villagers. We see a world brimming with vitality, but changing, with much at stake.

Why do our institutions fail to sense the dangers? Safina shows how philosophy, religion, and economics--all developed before we knew the world was round--are so out of sync with scientific realities that they're essentially irrational.

But in the cycle of seasons and the waves of migrating fishes and birds, Carl Safina still finds solace and delight and the power and resilience of living things. As revealed by Safina, the world still sings. The challenge now: to keep the music alive, for those who'll follow.

A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout is Safina’s blistering account of the months-long manmade disaster that tormented a region and mesmerized the nation. Traveling across the Gulf to make sense of an ever-changing story and its often-nonsensical twists, Safina expertly deconstructs the series of calamitous misjudgments that caused the Deepwater Horizon blowout, zeroes in on BP’s misstatements, evasions, and denials, reassesses his own reaction to the government’s crisis handling, and reviews the consequences of the leak—and what he considers the real problems, which the press largely overlooked.