Also of interest...in environmental scares

The View From Lazy Point

by Carl Safina

(Holt, $30)

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Naturalist Carl Safina’s record of a year spent at his Long Island, N.Y., ocean-side cottage “has its own natural, almost tidal rhythm,” said Susan Salter Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times. The author proves that “the best way to get people to care about wilderness, short of dragging them to it, is with writing that conjures breezes and smells and a sense of scale.” Safina “relies on beauty” for his faith in the future, and finds plenty of beauty on Lazy Point.

The Quiet World

by Douglas Brinkley

(HarperCollins, $30)

Douglas Brinkley’s new tribute to the Alaskan wilderness turns a sprawling, eight-decade conservation drama into very readable history, said Michael Scott in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The best-selling historian clearly has little sympathy for the many would-be “pillagers and despoilers” through the years who hoped to tap Alaska’s natural resources. Still, his book “brims with vivid characters,” from John Muir to Ansel Adams, who fought for the conservation cause and ultimately prevailed.

The Magnetic North

by Sara Wheeler

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26)

The Arctic Circle is apparently not the “crisp, white wonderland” we imagine, said Holly Morris in The New York Times. Author Sara Wheeler keeps an eye open for remnants of its “raw beauty,” but she’s discovered that this “poorly regulated” patch of earth long ago became a dumping ground. As she explores various ecological disasters caused by oil drilling and nuclear-waste disposal, it becomes ever more frightening to consider that the Arctic’s fate may foretell the fate of the planet.

Hot

by Mark Hertsgaard

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25)

It’s hard to believe that any new book about the dangers of global warming would do much good, said Bill Williams in The Boston Globe. In this “passionate and somber” new work, veteran environmental reporter Mark Hertsgaard does his best to argue for a “Green Apollo” project to counter a possible 7-degree temperature rise over the next century. But while Hot is well researched and well argued, it “might appeal more to policymakers than average readers.”