Books

From the author of Losing Earth, a beautifully told exploration of our post-natural world that points the way to a new mode of ecological writing.

We live at a time in which scientists race to reanimate extinct beasts, our most essential ecosystems require monumental engineering projects to survive, chicken breasts grow in test tubes, and multinational corporations conspire to poison the blood of every living creature. No rock, leaf, or cubic foot of air on Earth has escaped humanity’s clumsy signature. The old distinctions—between natural and artificial, dystopia and utopia, science fiction and science fact—have blurred, losing all meaning. We inhabit an uncanny landscape of our own creation.

In Second Nature, ordinary people make desperate efforts to preserve their humanity in a world that seems increasingly alien. Their stories—obsessive, intimate, and deeply reported—point the way to a new kind of environmental literature, in which dramatic narrative helps us to understand our place in a reality that resembles nothing human beings have known.

From Odds Against Tomorrow to Losing Earth to the film Dark Waters (adapted from the first chapter of this book), Nathaniel Rich’s stories have come to define the way we think of contemporary ecological narrative. In Second Nature, he asks what it means to live in an era of terrible responsibility. The question is no longer, How do we return to the world that we’ve lost? It is, What world do we want to create in its place?

“An unwavering look at our increasingly dystopian world. Rich presents humanity’s war against nature in vivid detail, with nature nearly defeated…Flowing and deeply researched prose paints scene after scene of the ubiquitous entropy that is gaining momentum…The weight of the book is carried by deeply humanistic and nuanced stories of those whose lives have been devastated and those fighting for justice on their behalf, alongside those playing God with nature via biotechnology and chemistry.”
—Dahr Jamail, The New York Times Book Review

“Nathaniel Rich’s electric Second Nature . . . is a tour de force examining the influence humans exert on the world . . . The reading experience is by turns demoralizing and galvanizing, like most worthwhile things.”
—Vanity Fair

“Vibrant…stories of bravery, passion, and inventiveness.”
—The New Yorker

“Vividly reported . . . Frightening but with an undercurrent of humor, Rich’s study is packed with moving insight.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Outstanding . . . Rich provides vivid, often disturbing portraits of individuals and events contributing to ‘the death rattle of the romantic idea that nature is innocent of human influence’ . . . an important book.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

“Rich’s elegy to a planet he likens to a critical care patient is lyrical, erudite, and devastating…[His] investigation of “crimes against nature” and the people who are trying to stop them is alarming, enlightening, and necessary.”
—O Magazine

“If Losing Earth was maddening (the only thing worse than staring down the barrel of endless scorching summers, soupy winters, and catastrophic wildfire seasons is knowing politicians could’ve done something about it and didn’t), Second Nature is unsettling.”
―Grist

“One of the singular pleasures of reading Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth is his ability to find and bring to life on the page the women and men engaged in saving the planet. This skill is not surprising, given that Rich is also an acclaimed novelist, but it does help explain why he is so good at what he does, as amply demonstrated in his latest book of nonfiction, Second Nature.”
―Air Mail

“The essays in Second Nature reveal important truths that gather power when they are read together.”
―Science

By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change―including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours.

The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich’s groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon―the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight. Now expanded into book form, Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry’s coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The book carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves. Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, Losing Earth is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here, and how we must go forward.

Winner of the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Award for Outstanding Feature Story. Winner of the American Institute of Physics’s Science Communication Award. Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

“Others have documented where we are and speculated about where we might be headed, but the story of how we got here is perhaps the most important one to be told, because it is both a cautionary tale, and an unfinished one. Reading this book, I could not help but imagine my children one day reading a future edition of this book, which will include the story of my generation’s response to what we knew.”

—Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals

“How to explain the mess we’re in? Nathaniel Rich recounts how a crucial decade was squandered. Losing Earth is an important contribution to the record of our heedless age.”

—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

“Combining the dramatic immediacy of a police procedural with the urgency of prophecy, Nathaniel Rich’s provocative book chronicles the failure of our scientific and political leaders to act to halt the climate apocalypse when they appeared on the verge of doing so, and casts the triumph of denial as the defining moral crisis for humankind.”

—Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

“Nathaniel Rich demonstrates exquisitely how shallow debate of a deep problem—the planetary scale and civilizational consequences  of climate change–becomes an exacerbating part of the problem. We are still a long way from thinking about climate in the multi-century frame we need to deal with it realistically. Getting there will be a new skill for humanity, if we get there.”

—Stewart Brand, author of Whole Earth Discipline

“Exceedingly well-written . . . a must-read handbook for everyone concerned about our planet’s future . . . Losing Earth is eloquent, devastating, and crucial.”

—Booklist (starred review)

“Gripping, depressing, revelatory…Climate change is a tragedy, but Rich makes clear that it is also a crime — a thing that bad people knowingly made worse, for their personal gain. That, I suspect, is one of the many aspects to the climate change battle that posterity will find it hard to believe, and impossible to forgive.”

—John Lanchester, The New York Times Book Review

“May portend the beginning of a cultural transition…Reading like a Greek tragedy, Losing Earth shows how close we came to making the right choices — if it weren’t for our darker angels.”

—Adam Frank, NPR

“[Rich’s] tale is vividly told, through the eyes of many fascinating characters, and it is packed with valuable reminders of the chances we missed.”

—Gabrielle Walker, The Times Literary Supplement

“Crisp, absorbing…it is essential reading…This is a well-told tale that grapples with Aristotle’s fundamental insight that humans are political animals — and asks whether we can finally, collectively, rouse ourselves to act.”

—Karen Long, Newsday

“Rich brilliantly relates the story of how, in 1979, a loose alliance…alerted policymakers to the existential threat, only to see climate treaties fail in a welter of ‘profit over planet’ a decade later. An eloquent science history, and an urgent eleventh-hour call to save what can be saved.”

—Barbara Kiser, Nature

“Rich pulls no punches in identifying villains and the long-term consequences of the victims, who tend to be all the inhabitants of a warming planet…Rich has a novelist’s instinct for finding quirky, memorable details…[Losing Earth] has a sharpness comparable to Thomas Paine’s pamphlets arguing the case for U.S. independence from England. ”

—Curt Holman, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Shimmering…Rich draws with verve.”

—Barnes and Noble Review

New Orleans, 1918. The birth of jazz, the Spanish flu, an ax murderer on the loose. The lives of a traumatized cop, a conflicted Mafia matriarch, and a brilliant trumpeter converge―and the Crescent City gets the rich, dark, sweeping novel it deserves.

From one of the most inventive writers of his generation, King Zeno is a historical crime novel and a searching inquiry into man’s dreams of immortality.

New Orleans, a century ago: a city determined to reshape its destiny and, with it, the nation’s. Downtown, a new American music is born. In Storyville, prostitution is outlawed and the police retake the streets with maximum violence. In the Ninth Ward, laborers break ground on a gigantic canal that will split the city, a work of staggering human ingenuity intended to restore New Orleans’s faded mercantile glory. The war is ending and a prosperous new age dawns. But everything is thrown into chaos by a series of murders committed by an ax-wielding maniac with a peculiar taste in music.

The ax murders scramble the fates of three people from different corners of town. Detective William Bastrop is an army veteran haunted by an act of wartime cowardice, recklessly bent on redemption. Isadore Zeno is a jazz cornetist with a dangerous side hustle. Beatrice Vizzini is the widow of a crime boss who yearns to take the family business straight. Each nurtures private dreams of worldly glory and eternal life, their ambitions carrying them into dark territories of obsession, paranoia, and madness.

In New Orleans, a city built on swamp, nothing stays buried long.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick, Paris Review Staff Pick. A January Pick by Salon, Town and Country, Southern Living, and LA Magazine

“Sprawling but speedy…a rich, contemporary canonization of the Crescent City at the turn of the century.”
—Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair

“A novel that roils with the inseparable energies of creation and destruction…Rich, a resident of New Orleans, throws his arms wide open to history and to the city…The novel, like a city, somehow coheres, as Rich never loses control of the riotous raw material. The close third-person point of view rotates among three central figures, providing pattern and the promise of convergence; the mysterious ax murders serve as a narrative through-line; the canal exerts centripetal and allegorical force; and the extraordinary American yearning of the characters, as in Stephen Millhauser’s ‘Martin Dressler’ or E. L. Doctorow’s ‘The Waterworks,’ is a constantly propulsive force…This is a novel with a high body count, but it has far too much energy ever to feel morbid.”
—Chris Bachelder, The New York Times Book Review

“King Zeno is the New Orleans novel we’ve been waiting for…It reminded this reviewer of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, with its clever melding of real and fictional events, its snippets of newspaper articles and astonishingly memorable characters.”
—BookPage

“Rich smears his lively prose with enough mud, blood, sweat and Oysters Vizzini grease that readers should keep a stack of napkins handy…Rich pushes the story ahead at a ragtime pace, alternating passages of florid description – particularly when Izzy is in one of his musical reveries – and bare-knuckle action…’King Zeno,’ a novel of underground forests, towns within towns and recurring nightmares suddenly come to life, is a page-turning reminder that in this venerable city, some buried secrets aren’t meant to stay that way.”
—Houston Chronicle

“Like a meal at one of New Orleans’ famed eateries, Nathaniel Rich’s new novel, ‘King Zeno,’ offers a groaning board of tasty literary treats…a gritty, panoramic portrait of the Big Easy…full of sharply rendered minor characters, gallows humor and finely observed descriptions…a remarkable achievement.”
—The Washington Post

“Rich tells a complicated story with great skill and style, sketching the mental lives of a dozen major characters and bringing a vanished era to colorful and realistic life.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Nathaniel Rich has a gift for depicting catastrophe…He is adept at conjuring details that tip a merely tense scene into one of horror…at capturing the ragged magnificence of the era’s musicians…King Zeno is an arresting addition to Rich’s grievous corpus.”

—Matt Sturrock, The Times Literary Supplement

“Rich uses music, race, and historical details in ways that will likely spark comparisons to E.L. Doctorow’s multifaceted Ragtime. It’s a nicely paced detective thriller, clever on corporate corruption and police procedure…marked by offbeat humor and up-tempo writing.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[A] vibrant tale of music, madness, and murder.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“[A] roiling genre-blender…combining a lyrical impressionistic style with a sure-handed grasp of the historical moment…a heady mix of literary thriller and high-end historical fiction.”
—Booklist

“[In] this dark, panoramic thriller…Rich excels at character development, painting vivid, interior portraits.”
—The Seattle Times

“Fans of historical crime fiction: Look no further than King Zeno…With its memorable cast of character and historical flourishes, King Zeno is a winner.”
—Bookish

“Rich’s spirited third novel contrasts the luminous early years of jazz with a number of particularly American darknesses…the New Orleans setting is well-drawn and memorable and Rich excels at immersing the reader in the narrative.”
—Publishers Weekly

“In this deft historical thriller, Rich seamlessly blends fact with fiction as three characters attempt to secure their legacies in the shadow of a gruesome murder, with post-World War I New Orleans as the backdrop…The period details—most taken directly from the historical record—are expertly deployed…[an] absorbing…brainy thriller.
—Library Journal

“Wildly imaginative…an artful blend of humor, suspense, and noir.”
—The National Book Review (Hot Book of the Week)

“Meticulously timed and plotted . . . Unforgettable characters . . . To read King Zeno is to see the city through Rich’s sharply observant yet loving eyes . . . It takes time to learn a city, to love it, to make a mark on it, and Rich has done that in King Zeno.”
—Susan Larson, The Advocate (New Orleans)

“An intriguing interplay between lurid action and a contemplative gaze across the millennia…gives King Zeno its distinctive tone.”
—The Boston Globe

“Rich knows well the city, its people and the racial hierarchies that underpin their life and this story…Rich has written a nicely paced detective thriller, with a twist, propped up by the realities of a society that is racist, yet multicultural in many ways. His offbeat humor and lively writing make King Zeno a good read on both levels.”
—Chris Smith, Winnipeg Free Press

“Those who have studied jazz history will find themselves right at home in Nathaniel Rich’s new novel, King Zeno…Rich, who lives in New Orleans, has given his city yet another reason for local celebration.”
—Robert Fulford, The National Post (Canada)

“Action packed . . . Rich has a feel for New Orleans life.”
—San Francisco Chronicle