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Editors’ Choice

9 New Books We Recommend This Week

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Jan. 4, 2018

There’s good news and bad news on this week’s list of recommended books. Well, almost exclusively bad news, at least in terms of subject matter. These picks cover the devastation of tsunamis, earthquakes and wildfires; the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918; mass extinctions; the potential for nuclear annihilation. Even the work of fiction included here is a fantasy about imminent catastrophe. The good news is the eloquent and haunting way in which these books are written.

John Williams
Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer

GHOSTS OF THE TSUNAMI: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone, by Richard Lloyd Parry. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A British journalist, long resident in Tokyo, probes the emotional and spiritual effects of the catastrophe that killed thousands of men, women and children in 2011.

THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, by Daniel Ellsberg. (Bloomsbury, $30.) When the Cold War ended in 1991, nuclear weapons vanished from the minds of most Americans. But Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, sounds an impassioned alarm, warning that the dangers of nuclear conflict remain.

MEGAFIRE: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame, by Michael Kodas. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) An account of the misguided history and dire results of America’s wildfire management policy that also captures the Sisyphean struggles of the men and women who battle blazes for a living.

PALE RIDER: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, by Laura Spinney. (PublicAffairs, $28.) The Spanish flu tends to be overshadowed by World War I in our cultural memory, but Spinney, a novelist and science writer, draws on medical mysteries and haunting vignettes to give the pandemic its due.

THE GREAT QUAKE: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet, by Henry Fountain. (Crown, $28.) In 1964, Alaska experienced an earthquake so powerful that, in one town, the resulting tidal wave swept away a third of the residents. Fountain avidly explains both the science and the human toll.

WINTER OF ICE AND IRON, by Rachel Neumeier. (Saga, $29.99.) The plot of Neumeier’s epic fantasy of magic and political intrigue feels familiar, but her writing has a spare, haunting quality that makes up for it. The characters hook; this is more satisfying comfort food than most.

THE ENDS OF THE WORLD: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions, by Peter Brannen. (Ecco, $27.99.) Earth has undergone five major mass extinctions and Brannen tells us about all the destruction in great detail.

DISCOVERING THE MAMMOTH: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science, by John J. McKay. (Pegasus Books, $27.95.) McKay examines our long fascination with the mysterious, extinct pachyderms that once roamed the earth.

INHERITORS OF THE EARTH: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction, by Chris D. Thomas. (PublicAffairs, $28.) Perhaps our “ecological despair,” as Thomas puts it, is overblown; he argues we are seeing a sixth evolution rather than a sixth extinction.