Books

What reviewers are saying ...

“engaging, informative, and eminently readable.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

A River Runs Again: India's Natural World in Crisis from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka (PublicAffairs 2015) explores the human and global health implications of India’s ravaged landscape. Traveling across India, Subramanian tells the stories of ordinary people and micro-enterprises who are determined to guide India into a sustainable future. By framing the stories of five environmental crises around the five elements, she introduces readers to an organic farmer who is reviving his land after the onslaught of the Green Revolution; villagers in Rajasthan who are resuscitating a river run dry; cook stove designers questing after a smokeless fire; and biologists bringing vultures back from the brink of extinction. And in Bihar, one of India’s most impoverished states, they meet a bold young woman teaching young adolescents the fundamentals of sexual health. Subramanian finds hope for a nation that has the potential to create a sustainable and prosperous future — and a model for the world. Short-listed for the Orion Book Award, Publishers’ Weekly gave it a starred review, and Kirkus Reviews called it “right thinking and accusatory in all the right places.” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert said it is “at once sweeping and intimate—a smart, informative, richly reported book full of memorable characters.”

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“A River Runs Again is at once sweeping and intimate—a smart, informative, richly reported book full of memorable characters.”

—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

“What happens in India may turn out—even more than China—to be the key to the kind of environmental future the planet faces. Very few people are qualified to tell the story with as much clarity, compassion, and character-driven power as Meera Subramanian.”

—Bill McKibben, author of Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist

“This is a necessary book. And Meera Subramanian is the perfect person to be writing it.”
—Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“Meera Subramanian has written an eye-opening and even inspiring book about a country that is so often terribly misunderstood by the West. Her serious but never morose storytelling introduces us to an India that is neither basket case nor Shangri-La, but a diverse land full of ordinary people questing for an extraordinary goal: a happier, greener future for 1.2 billion of their fellow citizens, and for the rest of us, too. We should all be rooting them on.”
—Dan Fagin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation

"By embedding numerous facts and data about India’s inhabitants into her engrossing narrative, Subramanian has created a work that belongs in all environmental collections."
—Library Journal

"Subramanian’s strong journalist ethic shines through in the penetrating questions she poses and the baleful eye she casts on those who would shrug off her perceptive observations about the clash between traditional practices and modern life. A significant and valuable inquiry into twenty-first-century India."
—Booklist

“A River Runs Again is a heartbreaking, yet hopeful, examination of the crises facing India as its environment reaches the breaking point. ... Through captivating individual stories, Ms. Subramanian never lets us forget that at the heart of India's environmental tragedy are its people. A River Runs Again is a lyrical hymn to human resilience and ingenuity in the face of environmental collapse, one we might all heed as humanity hurtles toward multiple points of environmental no return.”
—Mira Kamdar, author of Planet India: The Turbulent Rise of the Largest Democracy and the Future of Our World