A call to action from our leading environmental advocate that answers the climate questions posed in An Inconvenient Truth, a New York Times bestseller for nine months.

Since the publication of An Inconvenient Truth and the release of the Academy Award–winning film of the same name, former vice president Al Gore has led more than thirty “Solutions Summits” with top scientists, engineers, and policy experts to examine every solution to the climate crisis in depth and detail. Our Choice draws on conclusions developed through those summits as well as on extensive independent research, describing how the bold choices necessary to save the earth’s climate should also be the foundations of policies worldwide to create new jobs and stimulate sustainable economic progress.

Our Choice picks up where An Inconvenient Truth left off, providing a blueprint for solving the global climate crisis and drawing on Gore’s forty years of experience as a student, policymaker, author, filmmaker, entrepreneur, and activist. A corecipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his environmental work, the former vice president illuminates the real solutions to the climate crisis and describes a comprehensive global strategy to urgently implement them.

Printed on custom-made 100 percent recycled paper and featuring full-color photographs, illustrations, and charts throughout, Our Choice is an inspiring call to action to those ready to fight for solutions that really work—including some bold initiatives that were deemed impossible only a short time ago but are now gaining support around the world.

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A best-selling author’s revealing, forward-looking examination of Google’s outsize influence on the changing media landscape.

There are companies that create waves and those that ride or are drowned by them. As only he can, Ken Auletta takes readers for a ride on the Google wave, telling the story of how the company formed and crashed into traditional media businesses: newspapers, books, television, film, telephones, advertising—and Microsoft. With unprecedented access to Google’s founders and executives, as well as to those in media who are struggling to keep their heads above water, Auletta reveals how the industry is being disrupted and redefined.

Auletta takes readers inside Google’s closed-door meetings and paints portraits of the notoriously private founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as those who work with—and against—them. Google engineers start from an assumption that the old ways of doing things can be improved and made more efficient, an approach that has yielded remarkable results. Yet there are many obstacles that threaten the company’s future, and opposition from media companies and government regulators may be the least of these. Google faces internal threats, from its burgeoning size to losing focus to hubris. And in the coming years, their faith in mathematical formulas and slide-rule logic will be tested, just as it has been on Wall Street.

Distilling all he has learned from a career of covering the media, Auletta provides the fullest account ever told of Google’s rise, shares the “secret sauce” of their success, shows why the worlds of “new” and “old” media often communicate as if residents of different planets, and offers insights into what the future holds for this imperiled industry.

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One of the most successful newspaper editors of his generation on the glories of his beloved industry.

Harold Evans recounts the wild and wonderful tale of the newspapering life. His story stretches from the 1930s to his service in World War II, through towns big and off the map. Born to working-class parents in Manchester, England, he was a poor student who possessed a work ethic and drive that led to his unassailably successful longtime editorship of London’s Sunday Times. Evans discusses his passion for the crusading style of reportage he championed, his clashes with Rupert Murdoch, and his struggle to use journalism to better the lives of those less fortunate. There’s a star-studded cast and a tremendously vivid sense of what once was: lead type, the smell of the presses, eccentrics throughout, and angry editors screaming over the intercoms. And Evans also tells the story of his other great love: Tina Brown, the bright, young journalist who became his wife.

From a wartime beach in Wales to the gleaming skyscrapers of twenty-first-century New York City, Evans’s extraordinary career has spanned five decades of tumultuous social, political, and creative change. Whether exposing Kim Philby as a Soviet spy, pursuing a foreign correspondent’s murderers, or uncovering the atrocity of Thalidomide, this consummate newsman evokes his contagious passion: for the real story and the truth.

In an age when newspapers everywhere are under threat, My Paper Chase is not just the story of an amazing life, but a nostalgic journey in black and white.

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A celebrated scholar argues that religious fundamentalism is dying throughout the world, and being replaced by grassroots movements rooted in social justice and spiritual experience.

There is an essential change taking place in what it means to be “religious” today. Religious people are more interested in ethical guidelines and spiritual disciplines than in doctrines. The result is a universal trend away from hierarchical, regional, patriarchal, and institutional religion. As these changes gain momentum, they evoke an almost point-for-point fundamentalist reaction.

Once suffocated by creeds, hierarchies, and the disastrous merger of the church with the Roman Empire, faith—rather than belief—is once again becoming Christianity’s defining quality. This recent move away from dogmatic religion is best explained against the backdrop of three distinct periods of church history:

The Age of Faith: The first three centuries of Christianity, when the early church was more concerned with following Jesus’ teachings than enforcing what to believe about Jesus.

The Age of Belief: Marking a significant shift between the fourth and twentieth centuries when the church focused on orthodoxy and “correct doctrine.”

The Age of the Spirit: A trend that began fifty years ago and is increasingly directing the church of tomorrow, whereby Christians are ignoring dogma and breaking down barriers between different religions—spirituality is replacing formal religion.

The Future of Faith is a major statement and a hopeful look at a movement that is surfacing within Christianity and other religious traditions by one of the most revered theologians today.

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A celebrated political analyst’s exuberant and incisive coverage of the 2008 election—the longest, costliest, most surprising, and most intense presidential campaign in American history.

Hendrik Hertzberg witnessed the transformation of the Democratic Party, the meteoric rise of Barack Obama, and other seismic shifts in our national political consciousness while reporting on the 2008 presidential election for the New Yorker. ¡Obámanos!—the book title comes from a road sign Hertzberg spotted in New Mexico a few weeks after the election, a favorite example of what he calls “an artifact of Obamalove”—is adapted from Hertzberg’s “Talk of the Town” column and the informal blog he kept on his magazine’s Web site, and also includes an extensive new introductory essay by the author.

Hertzberg’s voice combines sharp observation, historical perspective, analytic power, and often funny polemic. He brings all these qualities to his chronicle of one of the most exciting and intense campaigns in the nation’s history, sharing how most Americans—including the New Yorker editors—came to identify a junior senator from Illinois as “a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe.”

Hertzberg—whose Obama coverage goes all the way back to the electrifying speech at the 2004 Democratic convention—follows the central political players and rising stars while also looking at the issues that emerged as critical during the debates: health care, the Iraq war, and our economic crisis. Through his documentation and analysis of the campaign’s defining moments, we come to understand the current political landscape in a whole new way.

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The architect of the Obama campaign reveals how it all happened—and why its lessons are not limited to politics.

David Plouffe led not only the effort that put Barack Obama in the White House, he also changed the face of politics forever and reenergized the idea of democracy itself. The Audacity to Win is his story of that groundbreaking achievement, taking readers inside the remarkable 2008 campaign.

For two years Plouffe worked side by side with Obama, charting the course of the campaign. His is the ultimate insider’s tale, revealing both the strategies that delivered Obama to office and how the candidate and campaign handled moments of great challenge and opportunity. Moving from the deliberations about whether to run at all, through the epic primary battle with Hillary Clinton and the general election against John McCain, Plouffe showcases the high-wire gamesmanship that fascinated pundits and the drama and intrigue that captivated a nation.

The Audacity to Win chronicles the arrival of a new moment in American life as digital technology and grassroots organization converge, and the exciting possibilities revealed by a campaign that in many ways functioned as a $1 billion start-up with laserlike focus and discipline. In this extraordinary book, Plouffe unfolds one of the most important political stories of our time, one whose lessons reach to the greatest heights of what we dream about for our country and ourselves.

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How the historic presidential election of 1912—and the values of the Progressive Party and its candidate Theodore Roosevelt—led to the equally historic election of Barack Obama almost a century later.

Led by Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party made the 1912 campaign a passionate contest for the soul of the American people. Promoting an ambitious program of economic, social, and political reform that posed profound challenges to constitutional government, Roosevelt and his supporters provoked an extraordinary debate about the future of the country. Sidney M. Milkis revisits this emotionally charged contest to show how a party seemingly consumed by its leader’s ambition dominated the election and left an enduring legacy that set in motion the rise of mass democracy and the expansion of national administrative power.

Milkis depicts the Progressive Party as a collective enterprise of activists who pursued a program of reform dedicated to direct democracy, social justice, and a balance between rights and civic duty. These reformers hoped to create a new concept of citizenship that would fulfill the lofty aspirations of “we the people” in a quest for a “more perfect union”—a quest hampered by fierce infighting over civil rights and antitrust policy.

As Milkis reveals, the party’s faith in a more plebiscitary form of democracy would ultimately rob it of the very organization it needed in order to survive after Roosevelt. Yet the Progressive Party’s program of social reform and “direct democracy” has reverberated through American politics—especially in 2008, with Barack Obama appealing to similar instincts. By probing the deep historical roots of contemporary developments in American politics, Milkis shows how Progressivism continues to shape American politics.

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How American, British, and European policies have conspired to keep Africa hungry—and a plan for how this 21st-century famine can finally be overcome.

For more than thirty years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet while the “Green Revolution” succeeded in South America and Asia, it never reached Africa. More than nine million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every year—most of them in Africa and most of them children. More die of hunger in Africa than from AIDS and malaria combined. Now, an impending global food crisis threatens to make things worse.

In the West we think of famine as a natural disaster, brought about by drought or as the legacy of brutal dictators. But in this powerful investigative narrative, Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman show exactly how, in the past few decades, American, British, and European self-interest and neglect have left Africa unable to feed itself. As a new generation of activists work to stop famine from spreading, Enough is essential reading on a humanitarian issue of utmost urgency.

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An unsparing, tragic novel of the lost American dream—and of the redemptive power of love and friendship.

Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation—as well as the acts of friendship, loyalty, and love—that arise from its loss. From local bars to train yards to prison, it is the story of two young men, bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them, who dream of a future beyond the factories and abandoned homes.

Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother commits suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown. But when he finally sets out to leave for good, accompanied by his temperamental best friend, former high school football star Billy Poe, they are caught up in a terrible act of violence that changes their lives forever.

Evoking John Steinbeck’s novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, American Rust takes us into the contemporary American heartland at a moment of profound unrest and uncertainty about the future. It is a dark but lucid vision, a moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendence and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.

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A challenging, controversial, and highly readable argument that the greenest community in the United States is New York City.

Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, wastelands of concrete, garbage, diesel fumes, and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, David Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan—the most densely populated place in North America—rank first in public-transit use and last in per capita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation.

These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn’t reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.

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