Books & Blurbs
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates (Knopf; available from February 16, 2021)
In this book, American business magnate and philanthropist Bill Gates shares his ideas about how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe.
Bill Gates has spent a decade studying climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has researched on what must be done to stop the planet's slide to a certain environmental disaster.
Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. He proposes a concrete, practical plan for what we need to do over the next decade and beyond to build the tools that will help us eliminate greenhouse gas emissions while scaling up the powerful solutions we already have.
Outlawed by Anna North (Bloomsbury Publishing; available since January 5, 2021)
Set in late 19th-century in an alternative version of the Old West in which America’s sexual morality has shifted to prioritise fertility rather than chastity, Outlawed is a captivating Western that tells the tale of a group of outlaws led by a preacher-turned-robber known as the Kid who is determined to create a safe haven for outcast women.
After a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, 18-year old Ada leaves behind everything she knows and joins up with the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang for protection. Voting in favour of the Kid’s plan to take over a town, Ada takes part in shootout action against the sheriff who has been chasing her from the start.
Featuring an irresistible and determined heroine, Outlawed is a fantastically cinematic adventure that dusts off the myth of the old West and reignites the glimmering promise of the frontier with an entirely new set of feminist stakes.
The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing by Sonia Faleiro (Grove Atlantic; available since January 21, 2021)
This narrative reportage by award-winning Indian writer Sonia Faleiro is a masterly investigation into the real stories behind the tragic deaths of two girls amid an epidemic of violence against women.
In 2014, a gang rape and murder of two teenage girls was reported in the Katra Sadatganj village of Uttar Pradesh, India. In the following months, the investigation into their deaths would instigate a national conversation about sex and violence and gain international attention. Slipping deftly behind political manoeuvring, caste systems and codes of honour in a village in northern India, The Good Girls returns to the scene of these two girls’ short lives and shameful deaths, and asks: what is the human cost of shame? Interviewing everyone connected with the deaths to produce a storyline in which different versions of the truth jostle for credibility, Faleiro exposes the deep-rooted patriarchy of the Indian system.
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