Like many coral specialists fifteen years ago, J. E. N. Veron thought Australia's Great Barrier Reef was impervious to climate change. "Owned by a prosperous country and accorded the protection it deserves, it would surely not go the way of the Amazon rain forest or the parklands of Africa, but would endure forever. That is what I thought once, but I think it no longer." This book is Veron's Silent Spring for the world's coral reefs.

Veron presents the geological history of the reef, the biology of coral reef ecosystems, and a primer on what we know about climate change. He concludes that the Great Barrier Reef and, indeed, most coral reefs will be dead from mass bleaching and irreversible acidification within the coming century unless greenhouse gas emissions are curbed. If we don't have the political will to confront the plight of the world's reefs, he argues, current processes already in motion will become unstoppable, bringing on a mass extinction the world has not seen for 65 million years.

Our species has cracked its own genetic code and sent representatives of its kind to the moon--we can certainly save the world's reefs if we want to. But to achieve this goal, we must devote scientific expertise and political muscle to the development of green technologies that will dramatically reduce greenhouse emissions and reverse acidification of the oceans.

At the end of history, nothing ever really ends. Though characterized, on one hand, by sociopolitical and economic stasis, stagnation, and decline, twenty-first century American culture has also been marked by the constant ebb and flow of preexisting artifacts and styles, so that when one fades out of fashion it is always replaced by another reiteration. Change, on the cultural level, has accelerated at an unprecedented rate, and old things are constantly returning anew. The present, in other words, promotes the feeling that nothing is changing and, simultaneously, everything is. In the midst of this paradoxical sense of constant flux and grinding stagnation, underwritten by the notion that there is no alternative to the malaise of the present, the nostalgic past emerges as the only viable refuge. The Reflective Age investigates how nostalgic American media of the 2010s and early 2020s reflects––and contributes to––these conditions, showing how the films, TV shows, music, and literature of the period illustrate a radical shift in both the role that nostalgia plays in the American cultural and political landscape as well as in nostalgia itself.

Erwin Rommel is the best-known German field commander of World War II. Repeatedly decorated for valor during the First World War, he would go on to lead the German Panzer divisions in France and North Africa. Even his British opponents admitted to admiring his apparent courage, chivalry and leadership, and he became known by the nickname “Desert Fox.” His death, in October 1944, would give rise to speculation for generations to come on how history should judge him. To many he remains the ideal soldier, but, as Reuth shows, Rommel remained loyal to his Führer until forced to commit suicide, and his fame was largely a creation of the master propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Stripping away the many layers of Nazi and Allied propaganda, Reuth argues that Rommel’s life symbolizes the complexity and conflict of the German tragedy: to have followed Hitler into the abyss, and to have considered that to be his duty.