What is Bill McGuire reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Bill McGuire, author of Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Volcanoes.

His entry begins:

I have just finished reading a couple of books that may, superficially, seem very different, but which hold in common salutary warnings for the future of our race as we rush headlong towards a maelstrom of climate chaos and resource depletion and the tearing apart of our cosy, comfortable, world. In the first part of his ‘The Century’ trilogy, Fall of Giants, Ken Follett immerses us brilliantly in the horrors of the First World War and highlights the sabre-rattling, intransigence and sheer lunacy of the political machinations that led to its onset. Looking forward rather than back – and needing no introduction, Suzanne Collins – in The Hunger Games - excels at building a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world of totalitarian government, repression, and televised child-on-child violence that is often visceral and which must – at times – shock the young adults at whom it is primarily aimed. As a geologist and climate scientist with an informed dread about what the future will hold for my – and everyone’s – children and grandchildren, both books...[read on]

About the book, from the publisher:

An astonishing transformation over the last 20,000 years has seen our planet changed from a frigid wasteland into the temperate world within which our civilization has grown and thrived. This dynamic episode in our planet's history, right at the close of the Ice Age, saw not only a huge temperature hike but also the Earth's crust bouncing and bending in response to the melting of the great ice sheets and the filling of the ocean basins--dramatic geophysical events that triggered earthquakes, spawned tsunamis, and provoked a series of eruptions from the world's volcanoes. In Waking the Giant, Bill McGuire argues that now that human activities are driving climate change as rapidly as anything seen in post-glacial times, the sleeping giant beneath our feet is stirring once again. When and if it finally wakes, we should all be afraid--very afraid. Could we be leaving our children not only a far hotter world, but a more geologically unstable one too?

Learn more about the book and author at Bill McGuire's website.

Waking the Giant is one of Fred Pearce's top ten eco-books.

The Page 99 Test: Waking the Giant.

Writers Read: Bill McGuire.

--Marshal Zeringue