Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul by Auden Schendler (Harvard Business Review). Reviewed by Julie Dunlap. “The most convincing passages in Terrible Beauty aren’t arguments at all. Instead, each chapter ends with a brief and beautiful personal essay that illuminates why Schendler chose climate change as the battle of his lifetime. He is not sanguine about the odds of success, but each poignant tale makes clear that he loves crystal skies, sea turtles, snowy slopes, and his children and ours too much to give up.”

The Stone Witch of Florence: A Novel by Anna Rasche (Park Row Books). Reviewed by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore. “It all gives a fun, mixed-genre feel to book, with each element working well within the whole. The accounts of plague-induced swellings, as well as of saints’ various lopped-off body parts, read like horror. The dread, dark feel of Florence, like gothic literature. Ginevra’s healing magic, like fantasy. The well-researched setting, like historical fiction. And the coziness? Like an enchanting, almost feel-good tale. While modern-sounding words sometimes broke the spell, the resonating timelessness of the prose quickly allowed me to sink right back into the story.”

Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures by Katherine Rundell (Doubleday). Reviewed by Gretchen Lida. “In his 1995 piece, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness,’ environmental historian William Cronon argues that part of the reason we’re facing ecological destruction is that we’ve created a false binary between the natural world and the human one. Such a binary plays out in nature writing, too. Good nature writing walks a highwire between the human narrative and the facts about our nonhuman kin. Without enough human experience or insight, a piece can feel brittle and textbook-like; without enough nature, the reader feels shortchanged. Rundell takes these binaries, sticks her tongue out at them, and then smashes them to pieces with her intense research and gorgeous sentences.”

I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine by Daniel J. Levitin (W.W. Norton & Company). Reviewed by Karl Straub. “The Mozart effect was clearly exaggerated. We all wanted to believe it was real, and we got a little bit out over our skis. Happily, in the years since, many studies have emerged demonstrating the extensive connections between music and brain function, and numerous books on the topic are now available. The latest entry, Daniel J. Levitin’s I Heard There Was a Secret Chord (a follow-up to his bestselling This Is Your Brain on Music) is that rare thing: a science book that’s accessible to the lay reader but also packed with enough serious information to function as a useful reference.”

A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Surprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps by Jonn Elledge (The Experiment). Reviewed by Drew Gallagher. “In the vernacular of its author, Jonn Elledge, A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders is bloody brilliant. Someone needs to tell him that the lines on maps are not supposed to be this entertaining. Granted, not everyone will be fascinated by the travails of poor Bir Tawil (more on that later), but if you’ve ever looked at the outline of Washington, DC, and were reminded of the partially chewed Cheez-It your toddler hurled from his car seat into your wife’s hair before proceeding to cry uncontrollably for the next three hours of the trip, then this is the book for you.”

Versailles: A Novel by Kathryn Davis (Graywolf Press). Reviewed by Willem Marx. “It proceeds with the warren-like logic of its namesake, categorically ejecting the possibility of a single perspective or plot. Veering from introspective monologues to architectural ruminations on the palace, the book transforms the palace itself into a confounding series of metaphors. Versailles is France and, at the same time, Antoinette. Versailles is real, constructed of brick and mortar on swampy ground, but it is also a fantasy. The narrative takes shape in the slits of truth between these statements.”

Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes by Jon Macy (Street Noise Books). Reviewed by Nick Havey. “Enter Djuna Barnes (1892-1982), the queer, crimson-haired heroine at the heart of Jon Macy’s gorgeous graphic biography, Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes. Born in an Upstate New York polygamist commune led by her father and grandmother, Djuna was one of the 20th century’s most iconic yet forgotten stunt reporters, writers, and all-around provocateurs. She loved art because her father, Wald Barnes, and grandmother Zadel Barnes loved it, but their pursuit of beauty came at the cost of nearly everything.”

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