Cara New Daggett’s The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work investigates how energy and work became central to Western imperial capitalism. For me, the book acquired increased poignancy when read at the intersection of the coronavirus pandemic and climate collapse. The contemporaneous classification of certain workers as essential, the reality that these workers are predominantly Black and Latinx, these communities’ historic and continued exclusion from adequate means of survival, their disproportionate exposure to environmental calamity, and the clear superfluity of fossil fuels gives a deep significance to Daggett’s observation that “resilience means more than adequate human employment, though this assumption that work results in the well-being of human civilization remains common” (p. 121). Whose work results in the well-being of human civilization, and how that work is to be performed, is at the heart of her inquiry.