“Romantic, urgent, valuable and appealing as hell.” —Andrew McCarthy, New York Times Book Review Writer Porter Fox spent three years exploring 4,000 miles of the border between Maine and Washington, traveling by canoe, freighter, car, and foot. In Northland, he blends a deeply reported and beautifully written story of the region’s history with a riveting account of his travels. Setting out from the easternmost point in the mainland United States, Fox follows explorer Samuel de Champlain’s adventures across the Northeast; recounts the rise and fall of the timber, iron, and rail industries; crosses the Great Lakes on a freighter; and traces the forty-ninth parallel from Minnesota to the Pacific Ocean. He weaves in his encounters with residents, border guards, Indian activists, and militia leaders to give a dynamic portrait of the northland today, wracked by climate change, water wars, oil booms, and border security.

The term "open borders" refers to a policy of allowing free movement between countries without restrictions or border control. In an era characterized by the Brexit referendum and the Trump administration's policy of restricting immigration in the U.S., the prospect of borders being open may seem improbable. A number of politicians, policymakers, economists, and citizens assert that referendums and restrictions are the best way to address the economic and social issues that the international community faces today. This volume helps readers examine the issue of open borders from a variety of angles, examining its economic, social, political, moral, and legal aspects.

As the planet warms, winter is shrinking. In the last fifty years, the Northern Hemisphere lost a million square miles of spring snowpack, and high-elevation snowpacks in the western United States have decreased by nearly half since 1982. On average, winter has shrunk by a month in most northern latitudes. In this deeply researched, beautifully written, and adventure-filled book, journalist Porter Fox travels along the edge of the Northern Hemisphere's snow line to track the scope of this drastic change and how it will literally change everything-from rapid sea level rise, to fresh water scarcity for two billion people, to massive greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost, and several climate tipping points that could very well spell the end of our world. This original research is animated by four harrowing and illuminating journeys-each grounded by interviews with idiosyncratic, charismatic experts in their respective fields and Fox's own narrative of growing up on a remote island in northern Maine. Timely, atmospheric, and expertly investigated, The Last Winter showcases a shocking and unexpected casualty of climate change-which may well set off its own unstoppable warming cycle.

Superstorms, hurricanes, typhoons, and spiraling freak weather: the fallout of global warming is a real-life natural thriller, as captured in Porter Fox’s urgent and stunning story of chasing the world’s most devastating storms. Here is the story of the largest storms on earth and how those storms are growing bigger and stronger. The tale of extreme weather doesn’t begin with floods, fires, or even the air that carries this change to our lives. It begins with the ocean. Oceans create weather, climate, floods, droughts, and most of the geophysical fallout of global warming. Exactly how, award-winning writer Porter Fox contends, depends on invisible ocean currents, planetary cycles just now being defined, and processes in the deep ocean that may well have already saved us from the worst effects of the climate crisis. In an attempt to avert a coming age of superstorms, sea level rise, and catastrophic warming, scientists followed the lead of a college drop-out-turned-maverick sailor and storm-chaser; a Romanian refugee turned BBC radio host turned circumnavigating mapmaker; and an audacious new attempt to study storms above as well as deep below the ocean depths, using drones. Throughout Category Five, Fox shadows these explorers, scientists, oceanographers, and weather forecasters in an attempt to understand, forestall, and possibly harness the awesome power of our oceans.

The United States is accustomed to accepting waves of migrants who are fleeing oppressive conditions and political persecution in their home countries. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the flow of migration reversed as over fifty thousand Americans fled across the border to Canada to resist military service during the Vietnam War or to escape their homeland’s hawkish society. Unguarded Border tells their stories and, in the process, describes a migrant experience that does not fit the usual paradigms. Rather than treating these American refugees as unwelcome foreigners, Canada embraced them, refusing to extradite draft resisters or military deserters and not even requiring passports for the border crossing. And instead of forming close-knit migrant communities, most of these émigrés sought to integrate themselves within Canadian society. Historian Donald W. Maxwell explores how these Americans in exile forged cosmopolitan identities, coming to regard themselves as global citizens, a status complicated by the Canadian government’s attempts to claim them and the U.S. government’s eventual efforts to reclaim them. Unguarded Border offers a new perspective on a movement that permanently changed perceptions of compulsory military service, migration, and national identity.