Scott Carney & Jason Miklian With Jack E. Davis: A Conversation

Jack E. Davis is a professor of environmental history at the University of Florida, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea and An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century. In The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird (Liveright), Davis takes readers from before the nation’s founding through inconceivable resurgences of this enduring all-American species. He contrasts the age when native peoples lived beside it peacefully with that when others – whether through hunting bounties or DDT pesticides – twice pushed the species to the brink of extinction. Americans have celebrated the bald eagle as majestic and noble, yet savaged this national symbol as a malicious predator of livestock and, falsely, a snatcher of babies. Filled with stories of Founding Fathers, The Bald Eagle is a cultural and natural history demonstrating how this bird’s wondrous journey may inspire us today as we grapple with environmental peril on a larger scale.

Jason Miklian, Ph.D., is a senior researcher at the Centre for Development and Environment, University of Oslo. He has published more than 60 academic and policy works on issues of conflict and crisis and serves on the United Nations Expert Panel on Business and Human Rights. He has also written for or has been cited by The New York Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, France 24, The Guardian, The Hindu (India), and the BBC and NPR. Co-written with author and investigative journalist Scott Carney, The Vortex: A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation (Ecco) tells the dramatic story of how a storm sparked a country to a liberation war in what is now Bangladesh. In November 1970, a storm set a collision course with Earth’s most densely populated coastline, East Pakistan in the Bay of Bengal. In just a few hours, the Great Bhola Cyclone would kill 500,000 people and begin a chain reaction of turmoil, genocide, and war. Pakistan was then on the brink of a historic election. The fallout from the storm’s impact ignited a conflagration of political intrigue, corruption, violence, idealism, and bravery. In The Vortex, Miklian and Carney take us deep into the story, told through the eyes of the men and women who lived through it.

Scott Carney is an investigative journalist, anthropologist, and author of The New York Times bestseller What Doesn’t Kill Us. He spent six years living in South Asia as a contributing editor for Wired and writer for Mother Jones, NPR, Discover Magazine, Fast Company, Men’s Journal, and many other publications. His other books include The Red Market, The Enlightenment Trap and The Wedge. Co-written with Jason Miklian, Ph.D., The Vortex: A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation (Ecco) tells the dramatic story of how a storm sparked a country to a liberation war in what is now Bangladesh. In November 1970, a storm set a collision course with Earth’s most densely populated coastline, East Pakistan in the Bay of Bengal. In just a few hours, the Great Bhola Cyclone would kill 500,000 people and begin a chain reaction of turmoil, genocide, and war. Pakistan was then on the brink of a historic election. The fallout from the storm’s impact ignited a conflagration of political intrigue, corruption, violence, idealism, and bravery. In The Vortex, Carney and Miklian take us deep into the story, told through the eyes of the men and women who lived through it.