Daniel Loedel has written “a debut
novel as impressive as they come,”
said Michael Upchurch in The Seattle
Times. “Tough, wily, dreamlike,”
it follows an Argentine expat who
returns to Buenos Aires in 1986 and
steps into a ghost story in which he’s forced to
confront his complicity in government atrocities
committed during the country’s 1976–83 Dirty
War. This spellbinding tale “will hit home in any
society where democracy, the rule of law, and the
very concept of the truth are in peril.”Best books...chosen by Elizabeth Kolbert
Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, Under a White Sky, explores climate engineering and
other bids to address humanity’s impact on nature. Below, the Pulitzer- winning author
of The Sixth Extinc tion recommends six other books about people and the planet.The Book List ARTS 23
Encounters With the Archdruid by John
McPhee (1971). McPhee’s prismatic portrait of
David Brower, the California mountaineer con-
sidered by many to be the “father” of the modern
environmental movement, is a classic. It captures
Brower’s often infuriating complexity, and in
the process poses one of the central questions of
our time: Can an affluent, technological society
co exist with nature, or are the two incompatible?
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next
Human Pandemic by David Quammen (2012).
When I think of books that have changed the
way I look at the world, Quammen’s The Song
of the Dodo, published in 1996, is near the top
of the list. Spillover is also a tour de force: It
basically predicted Covid-19. For understanding
how our treatment of animals, both domesticated
and wild, made the current pandemic—or one
like it— inevitable, there’s no better guide.Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist
and Other Essays by Paul Kingsnorth (2017).
Kingsnorth, a British writer and the co- founder
of a collective of eco- focused artists called the
Dark Mountain Project, has a message and astyle that are equally unsparing. In these often
savage essays, he explains why he doubts the
optimistic presumption that, in his words, “we
will be saved, by our cleverness, from the conse-
quences of our cleverness.”
The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and
Matter Transformed One Another by Ainissa
Ramirez (2020). Ramirez, a materials scientist,
argues that with our technologies we have trans-
formed not just the world around us but also
ourselves. It’s a fascinating idea, and Ramirez
makes it come alive through the stories of inven-
tors, some well-known, others underappreciated.
A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle (2000).
Fiction about ecological disaster tends to be writ-
ten in a tragic key. Boyle, by contrast, favors the
darkly comic. In this novel, set in 2025, an aging
radical environmentalist ex-con is caring for a
pop star’s Noah’s Ark–like menagerie when a
real flood arrives.
A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet (2020).
Millet’s take on eco- catastrophe is slyly off- kilter
in this novel about kids left to fend for themselves
as society unravels.Also of interest...in excavations of the past
Vanessa Springora
Vanessa Springora never
anticipated the impact her
memoir would have, said
Rosie Kinchen in The Times
(U.K.). Consent, published
in France early last year,
describes how a French liter-
ary celebrity initiated a sexual
relationship
with her when
he was 50
and she was- The book
“triggered a
cultural reck-
oning akin to
the #MeToo
movement,” awakening
multiple institutions to their
failure to police pedophilia,
especially among male art-
ists like Springora’s abuser,
Gabriel Matzneff. Matzneff had
garnered prestigious awards
for years after he wrote about
the relationship— referring to
Springora as “little V”—and
also about engaging in sex
with 8-year-old boys in Manila.
Consent is not a simple tell-
all, though. “I try to remind
people,” says Springora, who
now runs a publishing house
in Paris, “that this is first and
foremost a piece of literature.”
Springora could not be more
right about that, said Lauren
Collins in The New Yorker. In
Consent, which has just been
published in the U.S., her sen-
tences “gleam like metal” and
each chapter “snaps shut with
the clean brutality of a latch.”
She succeeds so brilliantly in
her stated goal of “ensnaring
the hunter in his own trap”
that it’s painful to think of how
many other books she might
have produced by now had
her early passion for writing
not been extinguished by the
overbearing Matzneff. With
Consent, she reclaims her
voice, which Matzneff had sto-
len by integrating her teenage
letters into his own books. The
runaway popularity of Consent
has been a happy byproduct
of her artistic triumph. “I think
that my book arrived at the
right moment,” she says.
“Five years ago, it probably
would have been buried.”
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This beguiling debut novel “show-
cases a delight in language that evokes
Nabokov,” said Heller McAlpin in
NPR.org. Two stories intertwine in an
“increasingly intense pas de deux”: In
the present, a low-paid intern tries to
weed out fake entries from a massive dictionary
while a century earlier a bored editor takes plea-
sure in inventing them. The two protagonists are
richly drawn, adding weight and warmth to “an
audacious, idiosyncratic dual love story about how
far we’ll go to save what we’re passionate about.”The Liar’s Dictionary
by Eley Williams (Doubleday, $27)
This engaging portrait of the work
that’s done in a crime lab offers
“something quite different” from pure
forensic science, said Kathy Reichs
in The New York Times. Sociologist
Beth Bechky spent 18 months observ-
ing technicians handling blood, weapon, and
DNA evidence to learn how relationships inside
and beyond the lab affected outcomes. The writ-
ing throughout is “crisp and jargon-free,” and
Bechky’s take on the conflicts inherent in forensics
“should prove enlightening to outsiders.”Blood, Powder, and Residue
by Beth A. Bechky (Princeton, $30)Hades, Argentina
by Daniel Loedel (Riverhead, $27)
In other hands, the story Danielle
Geller has to tell “might be too
grim to read,” said Joan Gaylord in
CSMonitor.com. Geller’s mother was
an alcoholic who abandoned her, then
died after years of homelessness, and
Dog Flowers is mostly drawn from photos, let-
ters, and journals the older woman left in a suit-
case. But Geller is an archivist, and as she uses the
suitcase’s contents to reconnect with her Navajo
roots and with some happy memories, she shows
how exploring the past can be healing.Dog Flowers
by Danielle Geller (One World, $27)