Category Five

Description

For readers of THE PERFECT STORM and BLUE LATITUDES, recast for our era of rapid ecological transformation, comes an urgent, stirring amalgam of climate writing, history, adventure story, and fascinating personal memoir.

The story of extreme weather doesn’t begin with heat waves, floods, fires, or even the air that carries this change to our lives. It begins with the oceans. Oceans create weather, just as oceans have shaped the arc of human civilization and the genesis and the growth of nations throughout history. The secret to understanding the frightening effects of climate change, award-winning writer Porter Fox contends, is in understanding how major changes in the oceans radically affect climate, hurricanes, droughts, and most of the geophysical fallout of global warming. To understand how we can live through the coming age of superstorms, scientists have followed the lead of a college drop-out-turned-maverick sailor and storm-chaser; a Romanian refugee turned BBC radio host turned circumnavigating mapmaker, Jimmy Cornell; and an audacious new attempt to study storms above as well as deep below the ocean depths, using drones.

Category Five revolves around Fox's time shadowing these mavericks and seeking out myriad scientists, oceanographers, and weather forecasters who are working with them, all in an attempt to understand and forestall — and just maybe harness — the awesome power of our oceans. Along the way, Fox takes us through the history of oceans and climate, and back into his own youth as the son of a celebrated boat builder — aboard a boat his father constructed.

Porter Fox was born in New York and raised on the coast of Maine. He is the author of The Last Winter, and Northland. He lives, writes and edits the award-winning literary travel writing journal Nowhere in upstate New York. He teaches at Columbia University School of the Arts and is a MacDowell Fellow.

Additional information

Dimensions	1 × 6 × 9.25 in
Imprint	Little, Brown and Company
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780316568180
ISBN-10	031656818X
Author	Porter Fox
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	SCI019000, SCI092000
Subjects	SCI092000, SCI019000