As soon as I picked up and started reading LESSONS FROM A DARK TIME, I wanted to have this conversation with ADAM HOCHSCHILD. As a writer, he doesn’t waste your time. He brings an artist’s touch and a moralist’s conscience to the issues and events he grapples with. He’s one of the founders of Mother Jones Magazine, and threaded through his journalism and his books – King Leopold’s Ghost, Spain in Our Hearts among them – is his concern for social justice and the people who fight for it. How did we get thorough dark times in our past? How are we going to get through these?

In the US today, we see how even one person willing to oppose the popular consensus can dictate our nation’s response to climate change. Meanwhile China has leapt into the vacuum created by our retreat. In her provocative new book, Will China Save the Planet?, BARBARA FINAMORE, Senior Attorney and Asia Senior Strategic Director, Natural Resources Defense Council, explores China’s big picture, long-term strategy to seize the leadership of the global response and reap the technological, economic, and political benefits.

When the three richest Americans have more wealth than the lowest 50%, shareholder capitalism is not working. In EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE: The Radical Tradition that is Shaping the Next Economy, NATHAN SCHNEIDER reminds us of a hopeful alternative – cooperatives – jointly owned, democratically controlled enterprises that advance the economic, social, and cultural interests of their members. Schneider previously wrote a book on the Occupy movement. You can learn more at nathanschneider.info

I’m always interested in what the US can learn from other countries. So I was immediately attracted to JOSHUA GOLDSTEIN’s new book A BRIGHT FUTURE: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow. When Goldstein (and co-author Staffan Qvist) did the research and the math on what it was going to take to reduce carbon emissions enough to avoid the worst of climate change, they concluded that rapid development of renewables would need a large and fast buildout of nuclear power to replace fossil fuels as backup for wind and solar. You may not agree with them, but I think this conversation is worth a listen.