B8 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 3 , 2022
Washington Post
H ardcover Bestsellers
COURTESY OF THE AMERICAN
BOOKSELLERS ASSOCIATIONFICTION1 FRENCH BRAID (Knopf, $27). By Anne Tyler.
The dynamics of a middle-class Baltimore
family evolve as the family expands over
decades.2 THE PARIS APARTMENT (Morrow, $28.99).
By Lucy Foley. A woman investigating her
brother’s disappearance suspects that his
neighbors might have been involved.3 A SUNLIT WEAPON (Harper, $27.99). By
Jacqueline Winspear. Word War II field nurse
turned detective Maisie Dobbs investigates
attacks on British pilots and finds an
overseas connection endangering Eleanor
Roosevelt.4 RUN, ROSE, RUN (Little, Brown, $30). By
James Patterson and Dolly Parton. A rising
country music star in Nashville tries to
escape her past.5 THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY ( Viking, $26). By
Matt Haig. A regretful woman lands in a
library where she gets to play out her life had
she made different choices.6 THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY (Viking, $30). By
Amor Towles. Four boys on a road trip take
an unplanned journey.7 ONE ITALIAN SUMMER (Atria, $27). By
Rebecca Serle. While mourning the loss of
her parent, a woman meets someone who
seems to b e a younger version of her
mother.8 CLOUD CUCKOO LAND ( Scribner, $30). By
Anthony Doerr. An ancient story survives for
millennia, stewarded by young people in the
past, present and future.9 THE MAID (Ballantine, $27). By Nita Prose. A
hotel maid cleaning a room finds a dead
body and becomes the lead murder suspect.10 THE ATLAS SIX ( Tor, $25.99). By Olivie
Blake. Six candidates for the magical
Alexandrian Society compete to become one
of five initiates.NONFICTION1 ATLAS OF THE HEART ( Random House,
$30). By Brené Brown. An exploration of 87
emotions to help people make more
meaningful connections.2 CRYING IN H MART ( Knopf, $26.95). By
Michelle Zauner. A Korean American indie-
rock star chronicles her relationship with her
late mother and their shared culture.3 THE 1619 PROJECT (One World, $38). By
Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York
Times Magazine. Essays contextualize the
history of slavery as part of the founding of
the United States.4 THE BOY, THE MOLE, THE FOX AND THE
HORSE (Harper One, $22.99). By Charlie
Mackesy. The British illustrator brings fables
about unlikely friendships to life.5 LESSONS FROM THE EDGE ( Mariner
Books, $30). By Marie Yovanovitch. The
former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine details
her upbringing and her foreign service
career.6 THE WOK (Norton, $50). By J. Kenji López-
Alt. A technique-based approach to cooking
with a wok, plus recipes for home and
restaurant-style dishes.7 ATOMIC HABITS ( Avery, $27). By James
Clear. How to make small changes that have
a big impact.8 THE NINETIES (Penguin Press, $28). By
Chuck Klosterman. A cultural history of the
1990s.9 IN LOVE ( Random House, $27). By Amy
Bloom. The best-selling author supports her
husband as he is diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s disease and decides to end his
life on his own terms.10 TASTE (Gallery Books, $28). By Stanley
Tucci. The actor and cookbook author shares
the stories behind his recipes.Rankings reflect sales for the week ended March 27. The charts
may not be reproduced without permission from the American
Booksellers Association, the trade association for independent
bookstores in the United States, and indiebound.org. Copyright
2022 American Booksellers Association. (The bestseller lists
alternate between hardcover and paperback each week.) B estsellers at washingtonpost.com/books3 SUNDAY | 4 P.M. Susan Kusel d iscusses “The
Passover Guest” at One More Page Books, 2200 N.
Westmoreland St. #101. Arlington. 703-300-9746.
7 P.M. Mikel Jollett discusses “Hollywood Park” at East
City Bookshop, 645 Pennsylvania Ave. SE #100. 202-
290-1636. $21.01.
4 MONDAY | 6 P.M. Henry Louis Gates and Andrew
Curran discuss “Who’s Black and Why?: A Hidden
Chapter From the Eighteenth-Century Invention of
Race”with Celeste Headlee, streamed through Politics
and Prose Live at politics-prose.com/event.
8 P.M. Elizabeth Alexander discusses “The Trayvon
Generation,” streamed through Politics and Prose Live.
5 TUESDAY | 5 P.M. De Nichols discusses “The Art of
Protest: Creating, Discovering, and Activating Art for
Your Revolution” with D.C. Public Library teen
moderators, streamed through Politics and Prose Live.
5:30 P.M. Paula McLain d iscusses “When the Stars Go
Dark” with Regina Brett, streamed through Politics and
Prose Live.
6 P.M. T.L. Huchu discusses “Our Lady of Mysterious
Ailments: Edinburgh Nights, Book 2,” streamed
through One More Page Books at
onemorepagebooks.com.
7 P.M. Ellen Crosby d iscusses “Bitter Roots,” streamed
and in person at One More Page Books.
6 WEDNESDAY | 12 P.M. Jim Al-Khalili discusses “The
Joy of Science,” streamed through Politics and Prose
Live.
7 P.M. Douglas Stewart discusses “Young Mungo” with
Bethanne Patrick a t Sidwell Friends School, 3825
Wisconsin Ave. NW. 202-537-8100. $10-$28.
8 P.M. Lilly Singh d iscusses “Be a Triangle: How I Went
From Being Lost to Getting My Life Into Shape,”streamed through Politics and Prose Live. $20.99-
$28.99.
7 THURSDAY | 5 P.M. Shawn Levy discusses “In on the
Joke: The Original Queens of Standup Comedy,”
streamed through Lewes Library at lewes.lib.de.us.
7 P.M. Valerie Biden Owens discusses “Growing Up
Biden” with Jon Meacham, streamed through Politics
and Prose Live and in person at George Washington
University, Marvin Center Amphitheater, 800 21st St.
NW. 202-994-7470. $10-$36.
7:30 P.M. Wesley Morgan discusses “The Hardest
Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s
Pech Valley” with Nancy Youssef at Lost City Books,
2467 18th St. NW. 202-232-4774.
8 FRIDAY | 6 P.M. Ellen Crosby p resents and signs
“Bitter Roots” at Bards Alley, 110 Church St. NW,
Vienna. 571-459-2653.8 P.M. Alka Joshi d iscusses “The Henna Artist” and
“The Secret Keeper of Jaipur,” streamed through
Politics and Prose Live.
9 SATURDAY | 1 P.M. Dana Stevens discusses
“Camera Man” with Timothy Noah at Politics and
Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. 202-364-1919.
3 P.M. Joshua Weiner, Daisy Fried and Francisco
Aragón read from their poetry collections at Politics
and Prose.
5 P.M. Greg Sarris discusses “Becoming Story: A
Journey Among Seasons, Places, Trees, and Ancestors”
with Tanya Thrasher at Politics and Prose.
7:30 P.M. Phil Goldstein d iscusses “How to Bury a Boy
at Sea” with Keith Parsons a t Lost City Books.
For more literary events, go to wapo.st/literarycal.LITERARY CALENDARApril 3 - 9Book World
EVER GREEN
Saving Big
Forests to Save
the Planet
By John W. Reid
and Thomas E.
Lovejoy
Norton.
320 pp. $40unique way of perceiving reality.”
One remote group, the Maybrat of New
Guinea, has no separate word for “nature” as a
realm apart from humans, and no single word
for “forest” — but a plethora of terms for
different places within them and relation-
ships to them. In one Brazilian Indigenous
language, there is no way to say that you own
land, and in another there is no way to call an
animal an “it.”
Kenampa, a Korubo Indian from the Javari
Valley in Brazil, spoke for many of the
Indigenous people in the book when he said:
“The forest is part of our family. When we look
at a forest, we don’t just see forest. We see
lives. Lives that need us just like we need
them.”
Rather than dismissing such views as
primitive or naive, the authors contrast tribal
peoples’ keen sense of the interdependence of
all living creatures with our own myopic
economic system, which gives more weight to
short-term profit for a few individuals than to
the long-term survival of the biosphere of
which we are a part.
When they asked their tribal informants
what they wanted to say to the readers of the
book, Reid and Lovejoy expected to hear
warnings about climate change, streams dry-
ing up or the loss of permafrost. Instead, the
most common message was an invitation:
“Tell them to come!”
Didn’t these forest-dwellers know that the
people they were inviting to their homeland
belonged to a civilization that was rapidly
destroying forests and the natural systems
that support them?
Undoubtedly they did know. But I suspect
they were motivated by the simple faith that
once we saw their magnificent forest up close,
we’d grow to love it too.
That was clearly the case for the authors of
this book. “Ever Green,” for all its scholarly
precision, is ultimately an impassioned plea
to save the world’s last great wild places by
two men who had come, through long profes-
sional acquaintance, to love them. Readers
will find their passion to be contagious.
And if you want to read more about the
great forests of the world, journalist and
educator Ben Rawlence’s book “The Treeline,”
published in February, is a masterful and
lyrically evocative exploration of the boreal
forests of the far north, which protect “the
sleeping bear” of the permafrost from melting
even more rapidly than it already is and
releasing its vast store of the greenhouse gas
methane into the atmosphere.The prospects are a bit less dire in the other
great forests, where population pressures are
not so acute. But all of them face threats from
logging and road-building as well as from
climate change, which will make it difficult
for many highly adapted species to continue
living where they are now.
Perhaps the most compelling argument for
preserving forests intact is that they are the
planet’s first line of defense against global
warming.
Big forests “metabolize the carbon” that our
industrial civilization spews into the air. The
boreal forests in the Arctic and the Congo
rainforest also safeguard, just below the
surface, huge deposits of peat, the largest
storehouse of carbon on the planet. Trees also
shade the Earth, and their leaves transpire,
cooling whole regions of the planet in much
the same way that sweating prevents our
bodies from overheating.
Moreover, maintaining forests is far cheap-
er than implementing technology-intensive
schemes for lowering the temperature, such
as carbon capture, or weaning ourselves off
fossil fuels. “Keeping carbon in tropical for-
ests costs a fifth as much as reducing emis-
sions from energy and industry in the United
States or Europe,” the authors report.
They are not arguing against reducing
emissions. But, they say, “the math of keeping
our world livable doesn’t add up” without
preserving megaforests, which exercise a
critical stabilizing influence on global cli-
mate.
To their credit, Reid and Lovejoy don’t limit
themselves to making these utilitarian argu-
ments for forest preservation, which are
persuasive but a bit dry. They intersperse the
science with accounts of what forests have
traditionally meant to the peoples who live in
them.
In New Guinea, where the terrain is divided
by isolating mountain ridges, more than 1,000
languages survive, more than all the Indo-Eu-
ropean languages combined. Megaforests, we
are told, are not just hot spots for biodiversity,
they are spawning grounds for a dazzling
diversity of cultures, “each with its ownW
hen asked about a proposed Redwood
National Park in 1966, Ronald Rea-
gan, then running for governor of
California, said, “A tree is a tree, how many
more do you need to look at?”
The quote appears in “Ever Green: Saving
Big Forests to Save the Planet,” by John W.
Reid, an economist and conservationist, and
Thomas E. Lovejoy, a renowned tropical-for-
est ecologist who died in December.
The authors offer an eloquent and fact-
filled refutation to the Reagans of the world
who see untamed nature as a blank space on
the map that cries out to be developed for
human uses. They detail why forests are a
critical life-support system for the Earth,
moderating temperatures, storing carbon,
preserving watersheds and generating “flying
rivers,” moisture-laden currents of air that
bring life-giving rains to regions both near
and far away.
The good news is that five almost unimag-
inably vast megaforests remain largely intact:
the Amazon, the North American boreal zone,
the Ta iga of Russia and far northern Europe,
the island of New Guinea, and the Congo
Basin. They are the Earth’s greatest deposito-
ries of biodiversity, where evolution continues
to this day and untold thousands of species
are yet to be discovered.
You don’t really know what a megaforest is
until you’ve had the experience of flying over
one, as I did during a reporting trip to the
Amazon in 2015. For more than an hour in the
middle of a flight from Brasilia to Manaus, the
largest city in the Amazon basin, I saw
virtually no roads or towns — only an ocean of
green striped by oxbowing rivers and stretch-
ing from horizon to horizon. I could scarcely
believe my eyes.
Since that flight seven years ago, Brazil
alone has lost tens of thousands of square
miles to forest cutting and the massive fires
that have followed human incursions. The
authors write that we are moving perilously
close to a point of no return when losses in
Amazonia may trigger an unstoppable transi-
tion of the entire ecosystem to a drier,
savanna-like landscape.
A plea to preserve
the megaforests that
keep the Earth alive
ECOLOGY REVIEW BY RICHARD SCHIFFMAN
Richard Schiffman is an environmental journalist
and the author of “What the Dust Doesn’t Know,” a
poetry collection.ALAN DYER/AP/STOCKTREK IMAGESA colorful
aurora over a
boreal forest in
Churchill,
Manitoba. Large
forests are a
critical life-
support system
for the planet
and the first line
of defense
against global
warming, write
John W. Reid
and Thomas E.
Lovejoy.