The Common Reading Program at Appalachian State University is delighted to offer The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here, from acclaimed scientist and author Hope Jahren, as the university’s common reading book for the 2024-2025 academic year. Jahren’s 2016 memoir Lab Girl earned the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Excellence in Science, and numerous other recognitions. In The Story of More, Jahren uses her signature engaging, accessible, and sensible style to expand awareness and understanding of the causes and challenges of the climate crisis.
From the publisher, who describes The Story of More as “the essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it”: Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist, a brilliant writer, a passionate teacher, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. In The Story of More, she illuminates the link between human habits and our imperiled planet. In concise, highly readable chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions—from electric power to large-scale farming to automobiles—that, even as they help us, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like never before. She explains the current and projected consequences of global warming—from superstorms to rising sea levels—and the actions that we all can take to fight back. At once an explainer on the mechanisms of global change and a lively, personal narrative given to us in Jahren’s inimitable voice, The Story of More is “a superb account of the deadly struggle between humanity and what may prove the only life-bearing planet within ten light years” (E. O. Wilson).
More information can be found on the Common Reading Program website.
About Hope Jahren
Hope Jahren has been pursuing independent research in paleobiology since 1996, when she completed her Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley, and began teaching and researching first at the Georgia Institute of Technology and then at Johns Hopkins University. She is the recipient of three Fulbright Awards and is one of four scientists, and the only woman, to have been awarded both of the Young Investigator Medals given within the Earth Sciences. She was a tenured professor at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu from 2008 to 2016, where she built the Isotope Geobiology Laboratories, with support from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the National Institutes of Health. She currently holds the J. Tuzo Wilson professorship at the University of Oslo in Norway.
