Maybe it’s not a beach read, unless you want to spend your lounging time contemplating rising seas, superstorms, and the grinding inequalities that will only be further entrenched by the wave of changes beating against the shore of our unstable climate. Editor John Freeman assembled notable writers from around the world (including Margaret Atwood, Edwidge Danticat, Yasmine El Rashidi, and Chinelo Okparanta, among others) and tasked them with commenting on where climate change is and will be most acutely felt, which often is where the writers themselves are from. The result is a collection of poems, short fiction, essays, and reportage that is fascinating in the way staring down a tsunami is fascinating. The book charts twinned humanitarian and ecological crises from Bangladesh to Egypt to Florida to Haiti in tones that range from galvanized and angry to haunted and elegiac. If you’ve only ever read the headlines about climate change wreaking its worst havoc on the world’s most vulnerable, Tales of Two Planets is likely to shock you. For everyone else, it will be a humanization of the broad trends you’ve read about, rendered with poignant specificity by writers who have actually lived them.
