"The hard, cold, sobering facts about global warming and its effects on the environment that sustains us. Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe is nothing less than a Silent Spring for our time."
-T.C. Boyle

"Kolbert mesmerizes with her poetic cadence in this riveting view of the apocalypse already upon us."
-Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

"Reading Field Notes from a Catastrophe during the 2005 hurricane season is what it must have been like to read Silent Spring forty years ago. When you put down this this book, you'll see the world through different eyes."
-Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind

"Reporters talk about the trial of the decade or the storm of the century. But for the planet we live on, the changes now unfolding are of a kind and scale that have not been seen in thousands of years--not since the retreat of the last ice age. In Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Elizabeth Kolbert gives us a clear, succinct, and invaluable report from the front. Even if you have followed the story for years, you will want to read it. And if you know anyone who still does not understand the reality and the scale of global warming, you will want to give them this book."
-Jonathan Weiner, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Beak of the Finch

"This country needs more writers like Elizabeth Kolbert."
-Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections

"On the burgeoning shelf of cautionary but occasionally alarmist books warning about the consequences of dramatic climate change, Kolbert's calmly persuasive reporting stands out for its sobering clarity... this unbiased overview is a model for writing about an urgent environmental crisis."
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Important...Precise and measured. Visiting an Inupiat community in Alaska, a butterfly expert in England, or a midlevel Bush administration official in Washington, D.C., [Kolbert] lets readers connect the dots to form a frightening (and still avoidable) vision of our future...[Grade:] A."
-Entertainment Weekly

"Field Notes From a Catastrophe is a small miracle of concision, gaining by its brevity and its plan of attack a rhetorical power that elucidates, rises to meet and deftly answers the historic crisis in which we find ourselves. Each chapter is part of a larger narrative, a loose travelogue that includes the Alaskan interior, Iceland and the Greenland ice sheet, but, more important, these narrative elements, while drawing us in, always keep a larger purpose in sight -- to offer the clearest view yet of the biggest catastrophe we have ever faced."
-Los Angeles Times

"Keenly observed and deeply memorable...the picture [Kolbert] draws is compelling-and very scary."
-Seed Magazine

"[Kolbert] has taken a topic that many people think of as an impersonal collection of hurricanes, spreading deserts, and rising oceans -- or perhaps as two lines crossing on a graph some decades from now -- and given it a human face. And, as important, given it urgency.Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change http://www.powells.com/biblio/1596911255?%26PID=25450 is an extraordinary piece of reporting."
-Grist.org

"Elegant and concise...If you have time this year for just one book on science, nature or the environment, this should be it."
-San Diego Union-Tribune

"Gripping, well-written...Kolbert never editorializes, but her message comes through all the louder for her restraint: Given what we know about climate change and how we, particularly we Americans, are responding, one can only conclude that we have deliberately chosen to destroy our environment and ourselves."
-Seattle Times

"[Kolbert] traverses the globe to observe first hand the jaw-dropping results of climate changes... she addresses the mind-boggling inaction - and in the case of the present administration, downright intransigence - on the part of most American politicians on the issue."
-St. Petersburg Times

"Comprehensive and succinct."
-New York Times

"...in speaking to the confused or disinterested masses, Kolbert has rendered a mannered account as compelling as it is enlightening, a litany of evidence that conveys a reality overwhelming and unmindful of what our society eventually chooses to believe."
-Portland Oregonian

"[Kolbert] traverses the globe to observe first hand the jaw-dropping results of climate changes... species going extinct, polar caps melting, water rising in the Netherlands or butterflies in England migrating to higher elevations than ever before."
-Contra Costa Times

"Very powerful...important."
-Hartford Courant

"Passionate...well-researched."
-New York Times Book Review

"Lucid... Kolbert forces us to ponder a tragic disconnect: Politicians, the group best positioned to do something about the scientists' warnings, turn out to be the group that's most adamantly ignoring those warnings."
-Austin-American Statesman

"On the burgeoning shelf of cautionary but occasionally alarmist books warning about the consequences of dramatic climate change, Kolbert's calmly persuasive reporting stands out for its sobering clarity...this unbiased overview is a model for writing about an urgent environmental crisis."
-Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette

"An elegant ride through the confusing world of climate science. Kolbert takes a John McPhee-style ramble across the world: In Greenland, Iceland, and poor little Shismarel, she sees the effects of warming firsthand. In Washington, D.C., the former New York Times political reporter puts her Beltway savvy to use, revealing that the most climate-change skepticism originates in the deep pockets of oil and coal companies."
-Outside

"Field Notes from a Catastrophe is a must read, because it details what we should fear and do everything possible to prevent -- instead of letting the barbarians in the White House deny the reality of the looming disaster to our eco-system."
-BuzzFlash.com