“Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them” is a mouthful of a title, but there’s a lot packed into it.

Part memoir, part travelogue and part scientific reportage, it’s stuffed with statistics that the cynical will say add up to one conclusion: This planet’s doomed. But while the numbers don’t lie and humanity is certainly going to exceed its temperature targets to halt global warming, Porter Fox has written a book that doesn’t read like the sky is falling.

That’s because he weaves all the science talk into a personal narrative, telling his own story about growing up on an island halfway up the Maine coast with a father who built sailboats for a living. Fox opens the book with a prologue about being caught in a storm while sailing as a young man. “I did indeed grow up working on boats, but I never learned about storms, how to avoid them, or how to sail through them. They haunted me for most of my young life.”

The book then introduces readers to a variety of “salty mariners” who share with Fox their lessons learned about navigating storms, their research into what causes them, and their predictions for the future of the climate. The jargon may have non-weather and boating enthusiasts Googling things like “katabatic squalls,” “violent sirocco” or “mizzen,” but Fox grounds his writing with good stories, either from his own life or told to him by the experts he interviews.

In the end, Fox argues, it’s water that might actually save us, if the world would just start listening to oceanographers. The world’s oceans contain “95% of livable space on Earth,” and while their warming waters wreak all sorts of havoc on this planet’s weather, they are also the “largest carbon sink on the planet.” It’s that sense of possibility, the “mystery of the deep,” that will give some hope.

And it’s books like Fox’s — climate science wrapped in a compelling narrative — that can hopefully change habits, one reader at a time. — Rob Merrill, Associated Press

During the past 150 years, Americans have built thousands of structures designed to allow large numbers of people to watch amateur and professional athletes, entertainers, circuses and rodeos. These places also have served as public squares, showcasing politicians and protesters.

In “The Stadium,” Frank Andre Guridy, a professor of history and African American studies at Columbia University, examines these arenas as barometers of American democracy, places in which Democrats and Republicans nominated presidential candidates; where Nazis, communists, segregationists, labor unions and civil rights organizations held rallies; and the political and cultural status quo was defended and attacked.

Guridy’s focus is on challenges to settler colonialism, racism, sexism and homophobia in stadiums and arenas. The Washington Redskins football team (now the Commanders), he reminds us, continued to caricature American Indians well into the 1990s.

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the Civil Rights Movement held events in stadiums and arenas across the country. These events, Guridy indicates, signaled some of the most dramatic changes in American society “since the collapse of Jim Crow.”

In the 21st century, he says, arguments for allegedly apolitical stadiums gained more traction as they became corporatized, spectators became whiter and workers got more Black and brown.

That said, Guridy acknowledges that the Black Lives Matter movement and George Floyd’s death transformed stadiums from compliant patriotism to contested spaces.

It remains to be seen, Guridy concludes, whether Americans will build on these manifestations of social justice and political democracy, all in stadiums that usually pit two groups of athletes against each other. — Glenn C. Altschuler, Minneapolis Star Tribune