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The cover of The Heat Will Kill You First

The Heat Will Kill You First

Jeff Goodell, 2023

See how rising heat overwhelms bodies, cities, food systems, and ecosystems, why danger falls unequally, and which protections can still reduce the harm.

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6 parts, about 21 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Shows heat as a quiet killer that reaches the poor, the old and outdoor workers first, and why that is a political choice
  • Explains how bodies, cities, crops, oceans and ice fail under heat, so a weather forecast reads as a real warning
  • Reported from trails, farms, borders and Antarctica, and careful to mark what the evidence shows and what remains uncertain

Who it is for

  • City planners and officials weighing how to protect residents from heat
  • People who work outdoors or employ those who do
  • Readers who find global warming averages too abstract to feel

What the summary covers

  1. When Heat Becomes a Deadly Extreme2 min
  2. A Family Hike Turns Fatal3 min
  3. Cities Build Heat Into Daily Life4 min
  4. Goldilocks Zones Beyond the Human Body4 min
  5. How Warming Changes the Odds4 min
  6. Cooling as Protection and Dependency4 min

Recommended by

  • Al GoreFormer Vice President of the United States
    Entertaining and thoroughly researched, Jeff Goodell brings the subject of climate-driven extreme heat to life in his comprehensive look at heat's substantial impact on humanity's past, present, and future.
  • Naomi KleinAuthor of This Changes Everything
    This searing plea for a better, fairer and cooler future should be read by anyone with skin in the game – which is every single one of us.
  • Amitav GhoshAuthor of The Great Derangement
    Meticulously researched yet thoroughly readable, this is at once a portrait of a heat-disrupted world and a primer for how to prepare for it.
  • David Wallace WellsAuthor of The Uninhabitable Earth
    The Heat Will Kill You First is a masterful, bracing, vivid portrait of the future we now know will be shaped, like clay, by that heat

About the author

  • Jeff GoodellAuthor and longtime contributing writer to Rolling Stone
    • Born in Palo Alto, California; grew up in Sunnyvale
    • Graduated from UC Berkeley in 1984
    • Received an MFA from Columbia University in 1990
    • Became a contributing editor at Rolling Stone in 1995
    • Has written about energy and climate for Rolling Stone for more than two decades
    • Previous book The Water Will Come (2017) was a New York Times Critics Top Book of 2017
    • 2020 Guggenheim Fellow

Read it alongside

  • Goes deeperMerchants of Doubt

    Jeff Goodell treats fossil fuel expansion after early warnings as a choice, while Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway trace how, in the 1980s, a US view favoring research over action won politically.

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