"I read this wide-ranging and thoughtful book while sitting on the banks of the Ganges near Varanasi-it's a river already badly polluted, and now threatened by the melting of the loss of the glaciers at its source to global warming. Four hundred million people depend on it, and there's no backup plan. As Steven Solomon makes clear, the same is true the world over; this volume will give you the background to understand the forces that will drive much...

Catherine Weldon, a portrait painter from 1890s Brooklyn, travels to North Dakota to paint a portrait of Chief Sitting Bull and becomes embroiled in the Lakota peoples' struggle over the rights to their land.