Audiobooks by Henry Finder

The Fragile Earth: Writing from the New Yorker on Climate Change

A classic collection of the New Yorker’s most urgent and groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of the climate emergency In 1989, just one year after climatologist James Hansen first came before a Senate committee and testified that the earth was now warmer than it had ever been in recorded history, thanks to humankind’s heedless consumption of fossil fuels, New Yorker writer Bill McKibben published a deeply reported and considered piece on climate change and what it could mean for the planet. At the time, the piece was to some speculative to the point of alarmist; read now, McKibben’s work is heroically prescient. Since then, the New Yorker has devoted enormous attention to climate change, describing the causes of the crisis, the political and ecological conditions we now find ourselves in, and the scenarios and solutions we face. The Fragile Earth tells the story of climate change – its past, present, and future – taking readers from Greenland to the Great Plains, and into both laboratories and rain forests. It features some of the best writing on global warming from the last three decades, including Bill McKibben’s seminal essay ‘The End of Nature,’ the first piece to popularize both the science and politics of climate change for a general audience, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Elizabeth Kolbert, as well as Kathryn Schulz, Dexter Filkins, Jonathan Franzen, Ian Frazier, Eric Klinenberg, and others. The result, in its range, depth, and passion, promises to bring light, and sometimes heat, to the great emergency of our age.

Cat Gould, David Remnick, Henry Finder (Author), Cat Gould, Gabra Zackman, Kaleo Griffith (Narrator)

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Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a "comic weekly." And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder's description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists of the modern era-among them Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, George S. Kaufman, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Peter De Vries, Mike Nichols, Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen, Donald Barthelme, Calvin Trillin, George W. S. Trow, Veronica Geng, Garrison Keillor, Ian Frazier, Roy Blount, Jr., Bruce McCall, Steve Martin, Christopher Buckley, and Paul Rudnick. This anthology gathers together, for the first time, the funniest work of more than seventy New Yorker contributors. Parodists take on not only writers like Hemingway and Kerouac, but TV documentaries, Italian cinema, and etiquette books. (Enough have been published, Robert Benchley maintains, "that there should be no danger of toppling over forward into the wrong soup, or getting into arguments as to which elbow belongs on which arm.") Other pieces offer perspectives on the heights of fame, the depths of social embarrassment, and the ups and downs of love and sex. Such well-loved sketches as Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" take their place alongside light-hearted essays on food, tennis, and taxis, and flights of fancy that follow an apparently simple premise to the point of no return, and sometimes well beyond. Here you will find large insights (Woody Allen: "Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage") and hard-earned wisdom (Ian Frazier on dating your mom: "Here is a grown, experienced, loving woman-one you do not have to go to a party or a singles bar to meet, one you do not have to go to great lengths to know"). And, not least, a great deal of helpful advice, including Steve Martin's on memory and middle age: "Bored? Here's a way the over-fifty set can easily kill a good half hour: 1. Place your car keys in your right hand. 2. With your left hand, call a friend and confirm a lunch or dinner date. 3. Hang up the phone. 4. Now look for your car keys." A rich selection of humorous verse includes caustic gems by Dorothy Parker, the effortless whimsy of Phyllis McGinley, and Ogden Nash's unforgettable slapstick prosody, as well as forays by luminaries who ought to have known better, like Robert Graves, Elizabeth Bishop, and W. H. Auden. A wonderful gift for others, or a delightful treat for oneself, Fierce Pajamas is a treasury of laughter from a publication described by Auden as "the best comic magazine in existence."

David Remnick, Henry Finder (Author), Chris Gannon, Patrick Frederic (Narrator)

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