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2026 Brown University Book Award

2026 Brown University Book Award

Price: $27.95

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Product Description

Item: 039363516

The Brown University Book Award is awarded to an outstanding high school or preparatory school junior who best combines academic excellence with clarity in written and spoken expression.

This year (2025-2026) the Brown University Book Award will be Floating Coast by Bathsheba Demuth A.B. '06, A.M. '07, Dean's Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University.

Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize (Best Book in Environmental History)
Winner of the John H. Dunning Prize (American Historical Association)
Named a "Best Book of the Year" by NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal


Floating Coast offers a groundbreaking look at Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada. For millennia, the Iñupiat, Yupik, and Chukchi peoples have called these unforgiving territories home. But as Demuth reveals in this lyrical narrative, the region quickly became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would the competing modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control the resources they craved?

Demuth shows how human ambition, from the hunting of whales and walruses to the extraction of gold and oil, has shaped the environment and how the environment, in turn, checks human power. Merging history, science, and economics into a single, compelling story, Bathsheba Demuth presents the profound tale of this "floating coast" and the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that human desire has brought to our finite world.

The Brown University Book Award is one price, $37.00, which includes shipping and handling (choose Brown Book Award as shipping option during checkout).