When It All Burns, by Jordan Thomas (Riverhead). Centered on the author’s experience with an élite team of firefighters, this analysis of California’s wildfires entwines an account of the state’s 2021 fire season with an appraisal of its record of fire suppression. Thomas, who is also an anthropologist, contends that flawed environmental policy, climate-change denial, corporate profiteering, and the genocide of Indigenous people—who, through controlled burning, nurtured a biodiverse landscape largely protected from destruction—established the conditions for today’s calamitous “megafires.” Wedding anthropological research and elegant descriptions of the natural world, Thomas builds an argument for a clear solution: “igniting more of the land.”
William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, by Philip Hoare (Pegasus). The artist, poet, and printmaker William Blake, who fused word and image in such visionary works as “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” lived through the French, American, and industrial revolutions. Though Hoare’s book takes up the events of Blake’s life—including his marriage and his lack of commercial success—it is not so much a cradle-to-grave account as it is a compendium of his influence on other artists and thinkers, from Derek Jarman to Iris Murdoch to James Joyce to the pre-Raphaelites. Hoare celebrates Blake and his “fantastical ideas,” and relates his own awe as he seeks out the artist’s surviving prints and looks through a pair of the man’s spectacles.
Illustration by Ben Hickey
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