PositiveSan Francisco ChronicleThe story [King] tells — vividly, often excitingly — is of two decent men devoted to public service ... Guardians of the Valley brings to life two compelling figures whose flaws are more apparent in our time than they were in theirs, a reminder that history is the final editor. It’s also a poignant portrait of an era when mere words could change the world.
Katherine Blunt
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleAs a portrait of a state in crisis, California Burning isn’t as dramatic as dispatches from the wildfire front lines — instead of heroic firefighters, we get lawyers and engineers — but Blunt is a thorough reporter and a lucid writer. She makes the struggle to supply California with power on a warming planet clear and compelling ... Occasionally in Blunt notes tentative optimism. She points out that PG&E has been a pioneer in solar power.
Lyndsie Bourgon
PositiveThe San Francisco ChroniclePoaching timber from public lands has a long history, which Bourgon outlines adeptly ... In supple, thoughtful prose that may remind you of Rebecca Solnit, Bourgon argues that however well-intentioned these policies are — even how essential they are to the health of the planet — they \'disregard and marginalize the working-class people who not only live among the trees but rely on them to survive\' ... The subtitle of Tree Thieves\' promises a North American focus, but some of its strongest chapters take place in the Amazon Basin, where an estimated 80% of all Amazonian wood harvested is poached. Here Bourgon finds a bit of good news: Along Peru’s Rio Tambopata, a 15,000-acre Indigenous-run conservation concession is attempting to manage the forest sustainably.
Eugene Linden
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleLinden is a clear, concise writer. He knows his climate science, and Fire and Flood makes points that stay with you.
Mary Roach
RaveSan Francisco ChronicleMary Roach is the Deborah Vance of science writing ... you’re hooked, and for good reason. Roach has a sure sense of drama, and she crafts sentences that crackle and pop ... In some alternative universe, Mary Roach and Deborah Vance are show business’ hottest comic duo, headlining nightly at the Bellagio or the MGM Grand, packing them in with laugh-till-you-cry tales of bad bears and bad breakups, rogue leopards and rogue lovers. Until that day arrives, you can savor this excellent book.
Lizzie Johnson
RaveSan Francisco Chronicle[An] epic, tragic, terrifying story ... It’s hard to imagine who could tell it better ... To research her book, she moved part time to Paradise; she enrolled in a professional firefighting academy to better understand wildfire. Above all, she talked to people ... Johnson skillfully intertwines stories of the town residents who confronted the apocalypse that November day. She vividly conveys the power of the fire itself ... Wildfires have inspired some of California’s and the West’s most harrowing and most necessary literature. You can add Lizzie Johnson’s Paradise to that list.
Mike Chen
RaveSan Francisco Chronicle... propulsive, entertaining ... Heroes displays Chen’s skill at portraying paranormal characters who are convincingly complex human beings ... The quest for identities — and for human connection — is what drives We Could Be Heroes ... Pacing and intelligence are key in sci-fi suspense, and Heroes is both brainy and fast on its feet. Chen also has a nicely comic touch with aspects of 21st century living ... What’s most striking about We Can Be Heroes is that it’s a dystopian novel that is more sunny than dystopian, warmed by the friendship that grows between Zoe and Jamie. Together they discover their pasts are more troubled than they knew, and that troubled pasts can be overcome.
Helen MacDonald
RaveThe San Francisco Chronicle... a bravura performance, displaying Macdonald’s literary gifts: her curiosity, her intensity of attention. And her pleasure of her prose — clear, tart, understated but regularly exploding into brilliance ... Some of the strongest essays are vignettes ... Sometimes, she suggests, like the swifts we must fly high to truly see ourselves and our world. This superb book helps us do that.
David Gessner
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleGessner embarks on a leisurely but consistently interesting journey that follows, more or less, T.R.’s loop around the West. Along the way, we get engaging local color (a gathering of Roosevelt impersonators in North Dakota) and a solid sense of the man: energetic, inquisitive, immune to self-doubt and an ardent lover of nature. Gessner celebrates Roosevelt’s conservation achievements: five national parks, 18 national monuments and the U.S. Forest Service ... Gessner wrestles with these issues thoughtfully, weighing Roosevelt’s accomplishments against the cold and ugly.
Ben Ehrenreich
RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleConfessional, contemplative, intellectually adventurous, Ben Ehrenreich’s Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time is a worthy addition to the library of American aridity ... He’s an elegant writer with a skill for capturing desert essences ... If you’ve come to Desert Notebooks expecting a straightforward jaunt across the American Southwest, these detours can be disconcerting. It’s as if your desert road trip was morphing into a graduate seminar, with everybody in the car talking about Hegel when all you want is to take the next exit, grab a Coke at the Circle K and make Zabriskie Point by sunset...Yet it works. Ehrenreich’s intellectual explorations are challenging but never pretentious. He’s searching, he’s trying to find hope and certainty in troubled, uncertain times. He makes connections ... Ehrenreich shows that deserts can make us wise in new ways.
Mark Kurlansky
PositiveSan Francisco ChronicleKurlansky excels in this variegated research, and if you’re puzzled by the occasional omission (a 416-page salmon book, and not one mention of lox?), you’ll be amply supplied with fun fish facts for your next salmon barbecue. But while Kurlansky’s past books have been quirky cabinets of curiosities, Salmon contains more somber undercurrents ... Not all the news is bad ... How do we save [salmon]? By saving the planet.
Bonnie Tsui
RaveSan Francisco Chronicle... succeeds brilliantly ... In theory, Tsui’s globe- and topic-hopping structure could make the book seem scattered. But the breadth of her reporting and grace of her writing make the elements of Why We Swim move harmoniously as one ... deepens from informative and entertaining to transcendent and moving ... There’s a poignancy to the fact that Why We Swim arrives just as COVID-19 has made so many bodies of water, from public swimming pools to beaches, off limits. But you can read it to remember just how good a swim can feel on a hot summer day and dream about when that day will come.
Mark Arax
RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleFew writers are better equipped to tell the story than Arax ... Arax narrates this tumultuous history skillfully, and if he isn’t completely successful in explicating the byzantine tangle of California water law, maybe it’s because nobody could be. He shines in profiling the gamblers, grifters and irrigation proselytizers who battled to make the valley their own ... \'Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive,\' Joan Didion writes in The White Album. The line is both astute and illustrative of the way water, land and the conjunction of the two have inspired some of California’s most powerful writing: Didion, Mary Austin’s lyrical The Land of Little Rain, Norris Hundley’s authoritative The Great Thirst, William Kahrl’s gorgeous, shamefully out-of-print The California Water Atlas, and, jumping genres, Chinatown, with its water-crazed Mephistopheles, Noah Cross. The Dreamt Land earns its place alongside them.
Robert Macfarlane
RaveSan Francisco ChronicleFew writers come as well-equipped for the subterranean task as Macfarlane ... It’s a tangled journey—part science fiction, part ancient myth—and Macfarlane narrates it elegantly. He’s a precise, tart, luminous writer, whose descriptions throw off sparks ... It’s also true that toward its middle, Underland lags a bit ... But his story gathers power as he descends into subterranean spaces linked to humanity’s grimmest moments ... a remarkable book.
