Modern/Post-Modern Literature

July’s People
Nadine Gordimer 

This novel is set in apartheid-era South Africa, where the Smales, a white land-owning family flee race riots aided by their house servant July, who hides them away in his village. Living for the Smales is primitive and adjustment is difficult, particularly the reversal of roles giving rise to July’s desire for increased respect. The switching attitudes between former servants and masters, now in opposite roles, is shown effectively through small details. Eventually the Smales become totally dependent on July for their hut, their food, even their lives. As this happens, July loses his subservient attitude, and the Smales begin to feel powerless and vulnerable. It also becomes clear that the Smales’ former small gestures of generosity and kindness by those did not excuse or justify the systematic oppression of July and his whole servile class. Gordimer’s writing is disjointed and jagged, with random lists and sentence fragments thrown together, dialogue with no speaker tags and dashes in place of quotation marks. This presumably is meant to create an authentic voice and a realistic texture to the setting, and in the end it succeeds in both respects, although with some blurring of the lines between dialogue and narration.

 Death and the Penguin
Andrey Kurkov 

Sometime between the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, an aspiring Ukrainian writer in Kiev named Viktor Zolotaryov is struggling to make a living off his short stories, and so he takes a job writing obituaries for important living persons—to be kept on file until needed. His constant companion is a king penguin named Misha, who Viktor adopted from the National Zoo when it could no longer afford to feed its animals. A vague organized crime connection requires Viktor also to bring Misha to funerals—sometimes burying those for whom he has prewritten obits. The honorarium Misha receives through Viktor for these appearances actually pays better than Viktor’s writing gig, and so Viktor accepts his obligation. Other funds come from a bequest of the deceased father of the young girl left in Viktor’s care. And the girl’s babysitter, who becomes Viktor’s lover, although still on the payroll, completes this odd family group. What is the mafia’s hold over Viktor and Misha? Why is Victor assigned to pre-write obituaries, and are these connected to the later deaths of some of the subjects? What does Viktor’s boss mean when he says, “When you do know what’s what, it will mean there no longer is any real point to your work or to your continuing existence”? Andre Kurkov creates an absurdist post-Soviet Odd Couple in Viktor and his penguin, one who yearns for the cold and the other who relishes heat, and together they lose control of a world so bizarre there is no use trying to make sense of it. It is a nightmarish Kafkaesque world but with a slightly cheerier daylight cinematography, leaving the universe more enigmatic than bleak. The writing is lean and engaging enough to prop up a plot that makes little sense. Death and the Penguin confirms the close affinity of Ukrainian and Russian literature, which makes the current Russian invasion of Ukraine all the more heartbreaking. Clearly, Viktor would not in the present day suggest taking his adopted family on holiday to Crimea.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette?
Maria Semple 

When her daughter Bee claims a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for perfect grades, Bernadette Fox, a fiercely intelligent shut-in, throws herself into preparations for the trip. But worn down by years of trying to live the suburban Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox is on the brink of a meltdown. And after a school fundraiser goes disastrously awry at her hands, she disappears, leaving her family to pick up the pieces--which is exactly what Bee does, weaving together an elaborate web of emails, invoices, and school memos that reveals a secret past Bernadette has been hiding for decades. Where'd You Go Bernadette is an entertaining and fast-paced novel—although a bit over-epistolary—about  about a family coming to terms with who they are and the power of a daughter's love for her mother.

The Midnight Library
Matt Haig 

It’s a Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz…we step off into other worlds, other lives, but in the end there’s no place like home. But once you figure out that will be the end of the story, the rest feels like filler, as many seasons of episodes as the show will support, until we finally resolve into the inevitable conclusion. The only real tension in the story concerns how long it will take the dull-witted Nora Seed to get the point: suicide – bad; living – good. Apparently, this book was quite successful. I hope that cheers the author up.

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Robin Sloan

Penumbra’s bookstore itself is an intriguing setting, opening the story to all sorts of possibilities. That it goes the route of a global, medieval conspiracy, code breaking, and eternal life, is a bit muddled and disappointing. It is interesting at the start how Clay Jannon happens upon this world and tries to figure it out, all the while navigating the normal trials of the young man in the city. The bookstore and its denizens promise mystery. But the deepening of this mystery turns to worn-out tropes and cliched characters. The prevalence—one might say the “penumbra”—of Google and “Googlers” over the story also becomes tired. Still, I love bookstores and am a sucker for novels that use enigmatic settings as characters, so I enjoyed the read. Perhaps I would have liked it even more if I had approached it as a young adult novel.

I Will Fear No Evil
Robert A. Heinlein

In the near and vaguely referenced dystopian future, ancient billionaire Johann Sebastian Bach Smith finds his body reaching its due date. He cheats death by using his enormous wealth to have his brain transplanted into a recently dead but somehow otherwise healthy body, which turns out to be his gorgeous, free-spirited secretary, Eunice. When Johan shocks everyone, including himself, by regaining consciousness after the operation, he finds that he controls the beautiful, young body but shares his consciousness with Eunice. The two share a love for each other, benevolence toward their many retainers, and insatiable desire for sexual union with just about everyone. The gender confusion and bed-hopping has its comic moments, but the story goes on and on before anything else of significance happens. I listened to the audio book and doubt I would have had the patience to read the whole book, which pales in comparison to Heinlein’s earlier and considerably less ribald science fiction.

Neverworld Wake
Marisha Pessl

It took months for Beatrice Hartley to recover from the death of her boyfriend, Jim, the creative genius adored by nearly everyone at their exclusive boarding school. Now, a year later, Beatrice is ready to see her school friends again, though she is not sure she will fit in or, as a scholarship student, ever really fit in with her privileged and entitled classmates. She overcomes her insecurities to show up and join a night out of drunken singing and dancing. The drive home does not go well, and the five friends find themselves in a purgatory where they will relive a shrinking part of one day over and over until they vote for just one of them to survive. The Groundhog Day repetition a hundred—a million? —times permits the characters every opportunity to explore and learn and find a way to cope with a Neverworld that increasingly takes on aspects of each of their lives. But the repetition doesn’t do much to flesh out their stock characters: the nearly perfect artist; the girl as smart as Stephen Hawking; the other girl so rich and beautiful her hysterics must be accepted. At any rate, these “friends” finally decide they must cooperate to solve the mystery of Jim’s death. Where this inquiry will end—and who will survive—remains uncertain until to story resolves, which happens credibly enough. This simile-laden novel may be sophisticated for a “young adult thriller,” but it pales in comparison to Pessl’s adult works, the labyrinthine novels Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Night Film.

Henderson the Rain King
Saul Bellow

Eugene Henderson is a big drunkard of a middle-aged billionaire American. He tells himself he wants to be a good person, but is instead arrogant, selfish and violent. So why should we care if he tires of his parents, his wives, his children, his pig farm and his violin lessons, and runs off to find himself in Africa, trying to satiate the inner voice shouting “I want, I want, I want!”? Eugene stumbles across a couple of remote African villages untouched by western civilization. His first stop is a village of people whose beloved cattle are dying of thirst because the water reserve is occupied by frogs. He tries to repay their kindness by killing the frogs, but just makes things worse and must beat a hasty retreat. In the next village he befriends a man who left medical school in Europe to become king of the tribe. The king thinks so much of Eugene that he drafts him as his successor, which is complicated by a close association between the tribe’s rulers and the lions who serve as their alter egos. Henderson the Rain King is a complex parody reminiscent of stories told by first-person narrators like Kafka’s Josef K., observing in a feverish, detached confusion a world that never quite makes sense. The extended metaphor is well written but a bit drawn out for my taste.

The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon

Okay, does anyone know what’s going on here? The Crying of Lot 49 is much shorter than Gravity’s Rainbow or V., but that doesn’t make it any easier to understand. On one level, the story is about Oedipa Maas, a meaningfully? named woman who discovers she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate and sets about her duties entwined in a mystery radiating from a muted post horn symbol she finds among the “lipsticked obscenities” on a latrine wall. If not a mystery, this book might be a meditation on post 60s’ America or a satire on the postmodernist novel. In any event, the narrative is suffused with layered satire, humor and mad brilliance. Oedipa seems throughout on the threshold of untangling some global conspiracy dating back to the 17th century but she, like we the readers, is left wondering. It has been said the only person who fully understands a Pynchon novel is Pynchon. For his sake, I hope at least this is true. In any event, the author seems to enjoy packing obfuscation and dense prose into this short novel, peopled with characters with ridiculous names like Genghis Cohen and Dr. Hilarius, and scenes such as when lawyer Metzger says he will answer one of Oedipa’s questions each time she removes an item of clothing, so she excuses herself to use the bathroom and puts on every item of clothing she can find before returning to Metzger's office looking like “a beach ball with feet.” This book left me puzzled and curious about what I just read, but fairly certain I will read it again.

The Good Soldier Švejk
Jaroslav Hašek 

In this 1921 classic, Švejk is a Czech soldier drafted into the Austrian army in World War I who adopts—and remarkably sustains for 892 pages—the guise of an idiot in order to avoid going into battle. Švejk is obsequious and enthusiastically respectful while throwing back at his officers their own orders, which reflect their hypocrisies and inanities and thus the pointlessness of war. He responds to one order after another by saying “Humbly report, sir,” and then launching into an extended anecdote that at first intrigues but then inevitably exasperates his listeners. At numerous points I as the reader was ready to throw him into the stockade myself just to shut him up. Critics see The Good Soldier Švejk as a masterwork of anti-war literature and Švejk as a precursor to Joseph Heller’s anti-war, anti-establishment hero Yossarian in Catch 22. I found Hašek’s extended indictment of war and bureaucracy to be an extraordinary—and often hilarious—satire in which the native wit of a simple soldier manages to hold at bay the rigid militarism of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The world needs more anti-heroes like Švejk.

Kaputt
Curzio Malaparte

Kaputt is series of reports on the atrocities and freakishness of World War II from the perspective of Malaparte himself, who covered the eastern front for an Italian newspaper. From fancy dinner parties to dogs used as tank bombs to hundreds of horses half-frozen in a lake, the episodes range from bewildering to grotesque. I would group this book with absurdist novels like The Master and Margarita and The Good Soldier Švejk except it reads like a memoir, and my own experience writing fictionalized memoir is that the most bizarre events would have been impossible to make up, so the result here is horrifying. The writing is vivid, which makes the disturbing images that much more effective. Malaparte had to smuggle the manuscript from Ukraine to Italy to be published in 1944. Kaputt is not an enjoyable or easy read, but it provides a first-hand view of the Nazi war machine from the perspective of a disaffected correspondent with incredibly free access, and is thus, I think, an important read.

The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov 

The Master and Margarita left me alternately fascinated and confused. Two stories intertwine: a Faustian devil wreaks seemingly random havoc on Soviet Moscow; and—in the novel written by the “Master” of the title—Pontius Pilate struggles with the execution he must order of Yeshua Ha-Notsri, a man who has spoken against the emperor. This story-within-a-story seems prescient of the current situation in Russia, regressing as it is toward a reprise of Stalin’s Soviet Union. But Bulgakov’s magical realism, layers of philosophy, religion and politics, extravagant allegory—featuring talking cats, naked witches, invisibility body cream, trumpet playing gorillas and dancing polar bears—and purposeful corruption of language never really captured me. I didn’t care about the thinly drawn characters, except perhaps the ill-fated Pilate, and found it hard to appreciate why this book is considered a comic masterpiece. It is absurd but not really funny.

Hawaii
James A. Michener 

Hawaii is sprawling historical fiction that, more than multi-generational, is actually multi-millennial, tracing the history of Hawaii from formation of the islands through the 1950s. Michener has a talent for depicting snapshots of history through evocative personal stories. Polynesians, New England missionaries and immigrants first from China and then from Japan populate and shape the island, each adapting and evolving in this unique and isolated political and economic world. Initially bereft of any vegetation, Hawaii eventually feeds itself and then exports crops like sugar and pineapple. The waves of arrivals face, or practice, religious oppression, ethnic prejudice, sexual and ethnic servitude and labor strife, all in a volcanic paradise of natural beauty. While Hawaii is quite a long book, I was sorry it didn’t extend further toward the present. That must be a mark of success of an epic novel like Hawaii.

Chesapeake
James A. Michener

Chesapeake is another Michener saga, this time covering America from 1583 to 1978 by focusing on the Choptank River, a tributary that drains nearly a thousand square miles of Maryland’s Eastern Shore into Chesapeake Bay. The story begins with native Americans discovering a congenial camping ground, and extends through generations of English settlers exploring, taming the land, fighting for their independence from England, dancing on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line during the Civil War, dueling with pirates, and fighting battles over slavery, civil rights and pollution. The earlier chapters, dealing with geology, natural history and the earliest settlers, were more engaging than the later chapters addressing political events at the time the novel was written. Michener has a remarkable talent for introducing a setting and taking his readers on a journey, showing how society evolves through generations by telling simple stories of daily lives. This book’s expansive length also allows room for chapters from the points of view of both goose hunters and their dogs and the geese themselves. And in the end the way physical characteristics remain unchanged over hundreds of years of human intervention and despoliation brings into focus the transience of individual lives. As Hemingway wrote, leaning into Ecclesiastes: The sun also ariseth.

The Forgotten Garden
Kate Morton

As in the Morton’s later The Lake House, a house and its surrounding land is a major character brought to life in The Forgotten Garden, though in this case the close parallels with Burnett’s The Secret Garden—right down to the title—felt like appropriation. The Cornwall setting is evocative and Morton’s language flows and is often lyrical, as when she describes “the white cottages clinging to cold crags.” But I found the frequent jumps between generations at times confusing, possibly made more so because I listened to this as an audiobook, and the behavior of some of the characters to strain credibility. Each of the four storylines is engaging in itself but the “mystery” tying them together is predicable and a bit thin to support the cumulative narrative. There just isn’t enough payoff to justify the extensive buildup.

Amsterdam
Ian McEwan 

Two ex-lovers join in burying a woman who remained a friend of both, then return to their lives of moralizing and contemplating assisted euthanasia. Clive the self-absorbed composer ignores a woman being mugged to work on his symphony. Vernon the scandal-mongering editor sets out to increase circulation by outing a potential prime minister in drag. They appear for a time to be the best of friends and in the end they well-deserve each other. The writing is very good. The themes are depressing.

Winter in Madrid
C.J. Sansom 

Winter in Madrid brings to life the Spanish Civil War in a personal story focused on character more than action. An enjoyable story in an evocative Madrid.

The Monkey Wrench Gang
Edward Abbey

Abbey wrote his novel propounding the idea of personal direct action to protect the environment (or “ecotage”) after observing the degradation of the canyon country of Utah and Arizona by the “Industrial Tourism” that dammed rivers and surrounded natural wonders with parking lots and Coke machines. It is prophetic that Abbey published his book in 1975, before most of us woke to the now-present threat of climate change. The book nonetheless attained cult status and inspired David Foreman to found the eco-activist group Earth First!, famous for its symbolic destruction of the Glen Canyon Dam by hanging a 300-foot banner that looked like a crack in the huge concrete structure. The novel follows an unlikely team of activists—flawed individuals all, but none of them a tree-hugging hippie—as they put aside their biases and differences to push back against the developers using up and spitting out the pristine desert. Its humor and action sequences carry the story while providing a roadmap for direct ecological action. In an essay accompanying the book, Bill McKibben wrote that what threatens us about Abbey’s writing is “the insidious idea that someone else might be leading a life with different means and ends, a fuller, more satisfying life. (A life that, not coincidentally , does less harm to the planet.)” Whatever you may think of this book’s characters, The Monkey Wrench Gang has to make you stop and think, and what higher calling could there be for a novel? 

The French Girl
Lexie Elliott

The French Girl swept me into its story. I felt like one of the ensemble cast trying to make sense of its shared past. I also loved the narration of Katherine McEwan and listened to this twice.

The Mirror & the Light
Hilary Mantel 

Hilary Mantel has crafted a masterpiece in her three books on the life of Oliver Cromwell, this being the third. Although the end is foretold, the beauty of the writing held me in suspense throughout.

The Witch Elm
Tana French 

I think I have read all Tana French's books to date and rate The Witch Elm along with maybe The Likeness as my favorites. The mystery is engaging and I loved the narrative voice. (I also listened to this audiobook twice.)

Night Film
Marisha Pessl 

Marisha Pessl creates a world of mystery built upon the complex filmography of a shadowy recluse and the people he holds close. The story kept me engaged and on edge throughout. As in her Special Topics in Calamity Physics, the writing in excellent.

A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman 

I loved this book! I was intrigued to hear my wife laugh out loud reading this book and so took my turn and had the same reaction. A Man Called Ove was fun, which is odd given its subject matter. Much better than the movie.

A Gentleman in Moscow
Amor Towles 

There is real art in combining a revolution and decades of house arrest to craft a feel-good story. I really enjoyed this book.

Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest belongs in the same category of sweeping epics as War & Peace and Ulysses. While the story occasionally snags on disquieting tangents, Wallace's voice and command of idiom are extraordinary--and often laugh-out-loud funny. As a novel writer myself, I found Infinite Jest infinitely humbling. It is only sad how this work seemed to portend the author's unfortunate end.

The Winds of War / War and Remembrance
Herman Wouk

The Winds of War and its sequel War and Remembrance together present a detailed chronology of World War II, from the rise of Nazism in Germany to the surrender of Japan, wrapped in a sprawling family melodrama. These books do an impressive job of digging into the motivations and strategies of the war while spinning the tale of how one U.S. Navy family manages to appear, Zelig-like, at nearly every major event of the time. Pug Henry, the family patriarch, unwittingly finds himself in substantive conversations with Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, Churchill, Truman and Stalin, rides along on an RAF bombing mission over Berlin, accompanies Russian soldiers at the front during the Nazi invasion, loses a vessel at Pearl Harbor, gives away his daughter to a young naval man assigned to the Manhattan Project and struggles to find a daughter-in-law imprisoned at Auschwitz, while in his spare time dealing with a philandering wife and a budding romance. It is no wonder Wouk needed so many hundreds of pages to fit the problems of a critical moment in history in with the complex lives of his characters caught up in the war. I found the passages of pure political and military strategy—from perspectives on both sides of the conflict—interesting and studious without for the most part slowing down the narrative. It was haunting to read this account of Hitler’s barbarous lust for power and territory while  Russia's Vladimir Putin was playing such a similar role--with the same predictable tricks—though with less success. These books are an excellent primer on the war wrapped in an entertaining and extraordinary family saga.

A Perfect Spy
John le Carré

As expected, a very le Carré spy novel: deep character study in a book with very little action.

Time and Again
Jack Finney 

Time Travel to Old New York: take out the attention paid the rather plebian means of traveling through time and the guidebook descriptions of 1880s Manhattan and the story is a bit thin. Still, this is the second time I’ve read Time and Again and I enjoyed the diversion and the minimal effort required after recently reading some more challenging books. The narrator is likeable, if irresponsible, and in the end he does what is necessary, which happens to be what he wanted all along. It was interesting to reread this juxtaposition of 1970 with 1882 from the perspective of 2021. If the hero knew what was in store for the third decade of the new century (COVID, Trump, Putin) he wouldn’t have hesitated to stay in the simpler time of the nineteenth century.

Sharpe’s Tiger
Bernard Cornwell

Years ago I read some dozen short novels by Bernard Cornwell—also made into a low-budget BBC series with Sean Bean and a cast of dozens—following the career of British soldier Richard Sharpe during the Napoleonic Wars, from the French invasion of Galacia in 1809 depicted in Sharpe’s Rifles to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 recounted in Waterloo. Sharpe’s Tiger is a prequel to these stories and deals with the start of Sharpe’s military service in India in 1799. It’s hard to fit the strong, confident Private Sharpe of this tale into the character arc set forth in the later Napoleonic period. It seems Cornwell found he had a successful franchise and so added preludes and postscripts as well as other inserted stories without a coherent plan for the series as whole, but then this is the doom of so many successful series, in print or on the screen. It also would be easy to criticize these books as essentially each telling the same story in the setting of a different historical battle: the crude and unpolished, yet inherently likeable rogue Sharpe is abused and tormented, and faces a challenge against overwhelming odds, but somehow prevails in heroic fashion, his innate nobility showing through. Still, I loved this audiobook just as I did those books and the television series. (If you liked Sean Bean in Game of Thrones you have to see him as the young Richard Sharpe.) Once again, I found the action to be, if extraordinary, still believable. Sharpe is no superhero; he is simply canny and resourceful and made for this kind of warfare. Also, as in Patrick O’Brian’s excellent Aubrey-Maturin novels about the British navy in the Napoleonic era, the battle itself rings true. Unlike many modern war stories focused on individual actions and special effects, the operational strategies and course of battle are explained here and make sense. Sharpe’s Tiger kept me engaged like a James Fenimore Cooper cliff-hanger, and I will return to try more of Cornwell’s additions to this series.

Talk to Me
T.C. Boyle 

T.C. Boyle has written another thought-provoking book, this time about the relationship of people, mostly a rudderless young woman named Aimee, and a chimpanzee named Sam, who has been raised among people and understands English to the level of three or four-year-old human and can sign his responses. Caught up in the big questions of what it means to be human and what part of dreams and wishes and redemption we share with the apes—with whom we at least share almost ninety-nine percent of our DNA—is essentially a love story between these two and a prophetic tale of the meeting of two species, which can only end in failure. As in books like Talk Talk and Drop City, Boyle here effectively wraps intriguing ideas in a very human (or in the case sentient being) story, which is both endearing and often humorous.

Corelli’s Mandolin
Louis de Bernières

Corelli’s Mandolin is a tale of two stories, one about the hardships faced by under-equipped Italian troops invading Greece in World War Two, and a second of how love blooms but is doomed in a time of war. The first part follows a solider suffering the horrors and absurdity of war and the pain of an unrequited love for a comrade. In the second part Captain Corelli leads Mussolini’s forces in occupying a small Greek town in Cephalonia. But Corelli is a gentle man, more devoted to his precious mandolin and his growing love for the Greek girl Pelagia than to delusions of empire building. These stories, while joined in an historical moment and lyrical prose, seem like two different books, and I wonder what led de Bernières to combine them into a single novel. It is evocative–first as an indictment of the insanity of war and then as a tender love story—that flows at times and bogs down at others, and a vivid snapshot of a backwater in the war ravaging Europe.

Inferno
Dan Brown

It seems the extraordinary success of The Da Vinci Code has typecast Dan Brown into writing thrillers wrapped in ancient riddles and set in UNESCO World Heritage Sites. I made it through this one, but by the end didn’t really care about the characters or the fate of the world. It wasn’t so much the long pauses to deliver lectures on art and architecture—even while the characters were fighting for their lives—but more the contrived menace and lack of any real character development that left me cold. It may be time for Professor Langdon to stop chasing conspiracies and get back to teaching his classes.

The Paris Architect
Charles Belfoure 

A French architect designing hiding places for Jews in occupied Paris sounds like the basis for an engaging novel. The Paris Architect is instead merely a plausible and simple narrative of collaborators and resistance. I got none of the rich color of Paris and felt no connection with the

characters. The most interesting relationship was between architect Lucien Bernard and his Nazi patron Major Herzog. (”After three months, he had come to regard the German as his friend, a kindred spirit. His unease over being friendly with the enemy had evaporated. Lucien was still annoyed that Celeste thought of him as a collaborator. He was merely an architect who wanted to work.”) Bernard’s struggle between his passion to design buildings and the fact that these buildings aided the German war effort reminded me of Alec Guinness in The Bridge over the River Kwai. In this case the movie was better than the book, which was readable enough that I finished it, but which lacked both the elegant prose of literature and the breathless pace of pulp fiction.

Nonfiction

H is for Hawk
Helen Macdonald 

I don't red much non-fiction, but H is for Hawk was an exception and an engaging and informative story. It brings the world of falconry to life.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
George Saunders 

With references drawn from short stories by Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev and Gogol, Saunders offers a class in writing the short story. It’s the kind of instruction that makes me wish I could have taken Saunders’ class at Syracuse. I have my doubts whether a typical reader—even of the subtle but complex stories from these Russian masters—really wants to see behind the curtain to what makes a story work. For a writer, however, there is much here to ponder, all presented in a lively, anachronistic voice. Saunders follows each story with an essay addressing the craft employed in writing the story and then further “afterthoughts” about the process of writing in general, which all made me feel I the needed to reread each story. His joy in the literature is infectious and instructive enough to make me do that, and I will no doubt read this book again from the beginning.

The Ministry for the Future
Kim Stanley Robinson 

The Ministry of the Future is a collage of images and scenes within a narrative of the hard facts we all face as climate change becomes a present danger and the biggest challenge to our planet. I did not find it satisfying as a story allowing me to inhabit lives of its characters, but it did provide much information I wanted to know, and felt I needed to know.

Crimes Against Humanity: Climate Change and Trump’s Legacy of Planetary Destruction
Judith Blau 

Blau's book is extensively researched and presents a bleak picture of the future we all face due to our focus on short-term results rather than the larger threats facing the planet, particularly when leaders such as our former president are able to subvert any hope of saving ourselves.

Unsettled
Steven E. Koonin 

Koonin offers a raft of educational and policy credentials to give credence to his attempt to set forth what we know about climate change, what we don't know, and why the distinction matters. He expounds at a depth of math and science beyond my understanding about how what the IPCC and U.S. government tell us about climate science is true for the most part, but leaves out whatever doesn’t fit the narrative, all in a concerted effort to spur us toward zero emissions of greenhouse gasses. He concludes that our climate is warming and human activity adds to this effect, but questions whether any efforts we could reasonably expect to undertake would stop or even substantially slow this warming. He suggests that, while efforts to curtail methane release, for example, make sense, we should also consider the “Plan B” of geoengineering and adaptation, which climate scientists don’t address for fear it will distract us from cutting emissions. My three-star rating is not a critique of Koonin’s thoroughness or the balance of his approach, but more of my difficulty wading through his graph and statistics-heavy attack on how current climate science is communicated to the public.

The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism
Keith Makato Woodhouse 

The Ecocentrists is a meticulously referenced academic treatment of the history of radical environmentalism in the United States—across the activist spectrum from the broadly based Sierra Club to the radical Earth Liberation Front. The divergent views on the tactics of environmental activism are reflected in his exploration of the philosophical underpinnings of these organizations and individuals who have inspired the movement. He criticizes the passion to protect an amorphous concept of “wilderness: an intuitively vivid reality for many people [that] completely vanishes under closer philosophical inspection.” He discusses the intersection of environmental activists and those focused on overpopulation and uncontrolled immigration. But at base Woodhouse is critical of dismissing the nuances and complexity of the real world to hold the strong moral ground, although he admits this is why strident ideologies are so appealing in the first place, in that they promise you'll never have to betray your motivating principles and emotional intuitions. “Abandoning that certainty means facing the fear your younger self would see you as a sellout and a failure, [which] might be right.” He delves into how “deep ecology” ascribes an equivalent value to human beings and nonhuman nature, which as a moral system stifles individual freedom. He criticizes “radical environmentalists,” who protest industrial civilization itself and whose philosophy leads to “ecocentric environmentalism,” which “originates in and privileges the United States and glosses over social differences, cultural complexity, and economic inequality.” Woodhouse finds the “monkeywrenching” and other direct action practiced by Earth First! and its more radical spinoff, the Earth Liberation Front, to be “a political position as much as a tactical choice, but that this political break from the mainstream quickly became tactical and philosophical too.” Anonymous, covert action, he writes, was designed as a catalyst to trigger a chain reaction—the riskier the action, the more resonant the statement—but he does not believe this justifies acts like “tree-spiking,” which pose risks to loggers and mill workers. While Woodhouse sees ecocentrism as a “tough, meaningful challenge to liberalism based on human reason, inviolable property rights, and majoritarian decision making,” he also acknowledges the debt we owe activists like Earth First! for protecting habitats from clear-cut logging, waging battles to block legislation or get legislation passed, and acts of civil disobedience. The Ecocentrists is a thorough and useful attempt to recount the history of a movement, beset by internal conflict over goals and tactics, but which at heart is motivated to preserve our natural resources and wildlife from corporate greed and governmental mismanagement. What is missing from Woodhouse’s assessment—published in 2018—is any meaningful discussion of climate change. He could criticize monkeywrenching motivated by a strip mine, a plan to clearcut a forest or dam a pristine river, but the utter failure of governments and industry as late as 2023 to address the pending disaster of climate change raises the stakes beyond any parochial issue concerning one forest or river to a global crisis, and we need passionate activists to sound the alarm.