Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, _The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimist's Guide to the Climate Crisis_

 YOU LIKELY ALREADY know about the climate crisis and may even feel you are not in the market for another book about it, but this one does offer an unusual perspective. 

Figueres is "former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change," co-author Rivett-Carnac "her political strategist" (I quote from the paperback's author bio), and both were deeply involved in bringing about the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015. Accordingly, they are  able  to provide not only a crisp explanation of what the crisis is, but also an insider's view of what an international agreement to address it might look like and how it could be brought about.

The ability of Figueres and Rivett-Carnac to envision effective international cooperation allows them to dial down the apocalyptic tone usually adopted by writers on this subject. They seem downright hopeful, in fact. How justified that hopefulness is, I can only guess, but encountering it in a book on the climate crisis was certainly a change of pace.