Thank you so much to Netgalley and Little, Brown and Company for an advanced ecopy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Heat Will Kill You First is a beautifully written, well researched, devastating read.

Jeff Goodell is a treasure who managed to do a thorough examination of the climate crisis without being boring or redundant. He uses a perfect mix of science and anecdotes to paint a full picture of the reality of our situation but he’s really gonna bum you out about what we have done to our planet.

An incredible read. The writing is exceptional and the tone just right for such a heavy topic.

Goodell strikes the right balance between technical and scientific information and anecdotal accounts of life on our overheating planet. While the subject matter is grim (you will be shocked and alarmed by the information shared), there is still some hope to find in human innovation, ingenuity, and resilience.

A truly frightening and important read about what climate change means for our world................................................................................................................................................................................

I received this eARC from NetGalley and the publisher in return for an honest review.

At the end of Heat, the author notes that our politics spends more time on book bans than banning fossil fuels, while the Earth experiences the hottest summer ever. Yet the author approaches the topic with more optimism than pessimism.

Goodell explains climate science, and in particular how heat waves and the planet’s rising temperatures impact flora and fauna, and humans. He crisscrosses the planet, sharing a variety of examples about real world impacts. This makes for an accessible and readable story. We meet some of the smart and passionate people who are working to understand and solve issues around the climate crisis and rising temperatures, and it is because of them that Goodell has hope.

But the situation we’ve placed ourselves in is urgent. Change is happening faster than most scientists anticipated. The discouraging part is our response needs to happen at such a scale that one person’s or group’s efforts, say to plant trees in a city, can seem futile. Much of the efforts he shares in his book are efforts to mitigate the consequences. But not how to accomplish putting a stop to escalating temperatures.

The Water Will Come is a super scary book from 2018 by Jeff Goodell, discussing the increasingly frequent disasters caused by climate change around the world. You may know him from his writing on climate change for Rolling Stone or hearing/seeing him covering climate and energy issues on NPR, MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News and The Oprah Winfrey Show. As if that weren’t enough, Mr. Goodell has a new book that – in case anyone hasn’t noticed the news in early summer 2023—tells us possibly way more than we want to know (or, for some of us, can handle) about the impact of rising temperatures around the world. I know people who STILL believe the weather changes are cyclical, and there’s no need to worry…as well as people whose religious beliefs cause them to see these as the “end times” so they just want to ignore any efforts to deal with climate issues. After all, it’s all part of…you know. Sigh.

If you can handle it, I highly recommend The Heat Will Get You First. It’s a mixture of awesome scientific information combined with stories about real people and the threat to all of us. TBH, I had to keep putting it down. It scared the bleep out of me. Also reinforced my feeling of helplessness in the face of the changes happening to us all.

With thanks to Little, Brown & Company and NetGalley for providing a copy in exchange for my honest review, this one is 5 stars for sure.

Jeff Goodell’s last book, The Water Will Come, was pretty alarming–but living in the Midwest, it wasn’t personal. The Great Lakes are not going to flood Michigan. But, The Heat Will Kill You First is downright frightening.
Especially this year when Canadian forests are burning. The smoke kept us indoors for the first days of our vacation, masked when outside–while back home, Detroit had the worst air quality in the world.

Is this the future? Uncontrolled burning of the forests, sunlight blocked, the air too polluted to breath? Grey skies that the sun can’t penetrate?

But the real threat of a hotter world is broader and more devastating. And Goodell serves it all up in a book that will raise the hair on your neck better than any suspense thriller you could read.

In the news today we read about temperatures higher than ever recorded. Our bodies, Goodell tells us, were developed for the climate of East Africa: dry and 72 degrees. What happens when our body temperature rises isn’t pretty.

Last May, I experienced early heat stoke while at a local garden center. It was in the 90s outside, the sun relentless outdoors and the greenhouses stuffy and airless. I didn’t feel well. My fitness watch showed my body temperature had risen two degrees! I fled to the air conditioned car, and hubby drove us home, where I cooled in air conditioning with an icy glass of water.

What first world, middle class luxury. Air conditioning.

It is the poor of the world who really suffer, and those who must work outdoors, and even those living in housing built for the moderate climate of the past. And that, my friends, is most of the world.

Climate refugees are already part of dystopian fiction, and will too soon become reality. As will the impact on agriculture resulting in crop loss, the migration of species bringing new diseases North, the destruction of ocean life because of warming waters…

If you aren’t alarmed, you aren’t listening.

And yet….and yet…Goodell holds on to hope that we CAN build a better world. There are people imagining better ways to live and perhaps answers to be discovered.

We are all on this journey together, he ends, humans and animals and plants and trees.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.

An incredibly detailed and illustrative book about what our future will likely look like and what we can do to prepare for it.

Reading about the heat in June seemed very appropriate - temperatures in the northern hemisphere were already soaring and many people were bracing themselves for another scorching summer. But this book is worth reading at any time, because even on colder days we should not forget that the heat is here to stay.

As many authors and experts have noted, the climate crisis is hard to define and comprehend, but easy to ignore. And denial is the worst possible strategy for humanity right now. So in trying to get people to act, it is good to focus not on the complicated and sometimes ambiguous science, but on the very real and tangible consequences. And that is exactly what Jeff Goodell has done in this gripping book.

Of course, heat itself can be misunderstood too - after all, as the author points out, who doesn't dream of lying in the hot sun? But more and more often, this so-called beautiful weather can turn deadly. And Goodell presents us with vivid stories of real people who underestimated the risk of heat and paid the ultimate price. It really makes you think. He also writes about possible strategies and solutions - not to fight global warming, it's too late for that, but to cope with it and make our future more bearable.

Thanks to the publisher, Little, Brown and Company, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

The Heat Will Kill You First" is a gripping exploration of the deadly consequences of extreme heat and the urgent need for action to address the growing threat of climate change. Both an important and compulsively readable book!

Full disclosure: I didn't just get an early look at THE HEAT WILL KILL YOU FIRST thanks to NetGalley; I read and bid (a lot) for the proposal when I was an executive editor at Thomas Dunne Books because it was amazing, promising a book as deep and affecting as Goodell's THE WATERS WILL RISE. Sadly, I lost HEAT at auction, and while that normally makes one bitter and hoping a book will fail, I feel the exact about this one. I was anxious to read the whole thing; heck, that's half the reason I bid on it. And, wow, does it not disappoint.

This is more than just a dry recitation of what the heat from burning fossil fuels is doing to the planet. It's a travelogue of a dying Earth, which makes the statistics and effects of the heat come alive (albeit by killing). For every sublime moment, such as being the first people ever to see the front of an Antarctic glacier before strapping sensors to seals so that what the heat is doing to those glaciers can be measured when the seals swim under them; there's a terrifying moment, such as hungry polar bear stalking the Arctic with no place left to go as the pack ice melts and only the author to eat. The writing is riveting and in its simple, straightforward horror would make Jeff Vandermeer jealous.

What gets me most is this. The whole week the book went to auction, it was well over 100 degrees in the city. Just brutal, baking weather. And only a few years later the heat is worse, with a heat dome smother much of the South and Canadian wildfires choking the north. In a weird coincidence, the family of hikers who die in the first chapter from the heat were mentioned last weekend in a story about another group of hikers who were killed by the heat. It's only getting worse, the heat, and this is the book that will tell everyone not what's coming, but what's already here.

And the only way to stop it is to stop burning fossil fuels. Yes, alternate power (solar, wind) is being adopted faster than most thought, so there's some hope, but clearly tens, if not hundreds of millions will die. With luck, some of them can be saved if this book, well, lights a fire under the right people.

This book is an excellent and easily-digestible addition to the growing stack of books on all aspects of climate change. As a side note, I also enjoyed Goodell's prior book about rising sea levels due to climate change, The Water Will Come. This one is similar in format and style, but of course, focusing on the rising temperature due to climate change, and how living in a hotter world affects humans, animals, plants, technology, weather, water, etc.

Goodell kicks things off with a gut punch - recounting the story of the family that died suddenly and - for a time - mysteriously in California, all healthy, but really, had just tragically succumbed to the extreme heat after underestimating nature and overestimating their ability to deal with a hotter world. So it goes. Each chapter addresses a different aspect of the rising temperatures, including the causes and effects, and how unlike some other extreme events like hurricanes or earthquakes, heat waves are more difficult to measure and are even more dangerous while flying under the collective radar. Efforts to adapt to the heat will be all-consuming, requiring changes to architecture, infrastructure, diet, and labor.

And, of course, Goodell reminds readers that the adversity to come will not be shared equally among us. Those with money can afford to live in greener, and cooler, neighborhoods. Certain populations will be the ones left to take on grueling manual labor outdoors out of desperation to put food on the table. Ice or snow will eventually be a commodity for the wealthy. And all of this will happen sooner than we think. We are on a collective journey out of the world of the past, for good or for bad. Goodell is a great writer, and this one is a fantastic addition to his work.

I expected The Heat Will Kill You First to provide more hypotheticals or at least more in-depth narratives about all of the ways that increased heat will change society as we know it. Goodell explores a decent variety of communities throughout the book but veers away from going too deep into how the heat will actually change those societies completely and how those particular societies changing will affect adjacent areas.

I found a lot of the book to be a rehash of things that anyone interested in climate change might already know or stories that already made headlines. There was limited mention of the Global South except for the known consequences of drought and food resources drying up and even discussions of the US and Europe focused mainly on how people will need air conditioning. The data used didn't necessarily help depict just how bad things could get.

Maybe I was hoping for something that was more anecdotal or prose-based but this book didn't inspire or educate me as much as I expected it to. I do think it will be good for those who are looking for an overall explanation of heat as a weather concept.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for a review.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I picked up another of his books in January called The Water Will Come and was absolutely enthralled. When I saw his next installment come up on #NetGalley, I jumped at the chance to get an advanced copy.

Like his previous work, his writing weaves personal stories, salient explanations of complex topics, and dire predictions for the future alongside depictions of what people are doing now to prepare - and whether it will be enough - into a captivating narrative where there is often existential dread and overwhelm at thought of the problem. His stories of people dealing with current heat issues deeply humanizes the plight we’re in for and transports the reader to a, “what will I do when this happens to me?” mindset, because it is now a when, not an if.

You can tell he was a reporter by the way he presents the reality of climate change in a compartmentalized way such that you’re not drinking from a firehouse of facts and figures. This lets the reader not only understand the gravity of the problem, but also bring the focus down to what we could feasibly do to change course.

Overall, I love Goodell’s books and they are always one of the firsts I recommend to people just exploring contemporary climate science and activism.