Books That Enlarge the World, Broaden the Horizon

Thought-provoking, maybe unsettling, possibly heartbreaking, dealing with important social issues, different global or cultural perspectives

We read because “we want to see with other eyes…
to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.”  
~C.S. Lewis

 “You think your pain and your heartbreak are
unprecedented in the history of the world,
but then you read. It was books that taught me
that the things that tormented me most were the
very things that connected me with all the people
who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”
~James Baldwin

I wish I could remember how I first came to read The Diary of Anne Frank. Did my mother give me a copy? Did I find it at the library? Did I know anything at all about the Holocaust before then? I can’t recall.

I do know that I was already an avid reader, but my childish imagination had been fed largely by the delightful likes of Little Women, the Narnia Chronicles, The Secret Garden, The Wind in the Willows, Little House on the Prairie.

Nothing like Anne Frank’s diary had ever crossed my radar before.

But I do know I read the diary over and over again. I must have been about twelve or thirteen when it first came into my hands, because I identified so closely with Anne, who began to keep the diary just after her own thirteenth birthday. At first I was intrigued by the drama, the hardships and improvisations of the two Jewish families living in hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland. I sympathized with her complex feelings for her parents and friends, admiring of her skill as a budding writer (as I thought myself to be at the time). When the fear, treachery, hatred, and tragedy of the whole story slowly dawned on me—when I realized what monstrous machinery Anne had gotten caught up in, and learned of her terrible final months in the camps, and her death just before the end of the war—it changed the very fabric of my mind, irrevocably altering and enlarging my sense of the possibilities, for good and evil, of human life and history, my awareness of the fate of the vulnerable and persecuted in circumstances vastly different from my own.

Although I could not have articulated it at the time, I was dimly conscious that as painful as it was to know Anne’s fate, I needed to know it. And having let her diary into my tidy inner library, there was no turning back. (And having left that door open in my mind, I was the readier, perhaps, to meet Etty Hillesum when she crossed the threshold of my awareness many years later. Etty’s diaries and letters (An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork) rocked me to my core: they comprise a clear-eyed, first-hand account of the darkest years of Nazi occupation and genocide in Holland, and one of the moving and persuasive spiritual autobiographies, testimony to “the peace that passes understanding,” that I have ever encountered. “We left the camp singing,” she wrote on a postcard thrown from the train that took her to her death at Auschwitz, at the age of twenty-nine.)

Now, from time to time—when I’m feeling strong enough, or paradoxically when I become aware of how myopic or blinkered my mind and heart have become—I deliberately choose to read books that take me way outside my comfort zone.

I need to try to “see with other eyes, to feel with other hearts” since my own life is so privileged, and the possibility of not seeing is so great (and the consequences so perilous). Reading about the trials and limitations of others’ circumstances is of course no substitute for doing something about them, and can indeed feed a dangerous self-deceived complacency—the unexamined assumption that because I read a book about (for instance) child abuse or sex trafficking, I know what it is to be an abused child or a child sold into prostitution, or have done anything to help those who are so abused and sold. However, avoiding any knowledge of these terrible realities is worse, and leads away from rather than toward the possibility of being an agent of change.

So I read.

There has been a plethora of recent books on the pernicious omnipresence of racism in our society, and the poisonous heritage of slavery. The following books have opened my eyes in uncomfortable ways (since I thought my eyes were already open) about those evils, and also taught me much about other forms of cruel oppression, exploitation, prejudice and the kind of poverty that kills.

Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race by Debby Irving is an honest, disarming, confessional account of her personal struggle to understand racism and the ways even the most “liberal” and well-intentioned white people benefit from and participate in institutional bias. It is also a well-researched and eye-opening historical/sociological study of the ways that that bias is entrenched in everything from public transportation routes and employment and urban planning to college admissions and law enforcement.

Small Great Things, a novel by Jodi Picoult, also looks at racism both institutional and personal: for a seminar or book club it would be a good “soft text” to accompany Waking Up White. A skilled and experienced labor and delivery nurse is prohibited from caring for a critically ill newborn because the parents have refused to let any African-American person touch their child. The consequences put the nurse (and the hospital, and the white supremacist parents—and the whole entrenched system of power, race and privilege) on trial.

Blood from a Stone by Donna Leon is both a worthy addition to the author’s series of detective novels set in Venice, featuring police Commissario Guido Brunetti, and a chilling look beneath the surface of Italy’s own crisis of immigration and its part in the dark underworld of drug trafficking in Europe.

The Burgess Boys by Pulitzer-prize-winning Elizabeth Strout is a masterpiece on any level: partly a story of the what  happens when a large contingent of Somali refugees move to a small town in Maine, partly a brilliant and compassionate story of the dysfunctional Burgess family, part a sad exploration of all the ways we hurt and misunderstand each other.

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu (himself an Ethiopian émigré) tells the story of an Ethiopian immigrant in Washington DC, running a failing little grocery store, dreaming of better times, hoping for an end to his homesickness. His isolation from his family at home in Ethiopia, his friendships with two other African men, and his nascent friendship with a white woman and her biracial daughter who move into the neighborhood are all heart-achingly drawn. At one level another look at the politics of racism, at another level a brilliant exploration of all human hope and love and loneliness.

From other countries, other cultures:

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry weaves together the stories of the lives of several interconnected characters from different castes in India in the 1970s. Brilliantly written, tragic from beginning to end, detailing the everyday cruelty, corruption, courage, loyalty, and dignity in that world—this is one of those priceless books simultaneously painful to read, hard to put down, and impossible to forget.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo reads like a novel but is not. A dazzling work years in the making, it is the best kind of investigative social-justice journalism and a literary tour de force at the same time, telling the stories of those caught up a turbulent time full of promise and despair in the slums of India’s largest city.

From 18th century Ghana to Jazz Age Harlem, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, a remarkable debut novel, traces eight generations’ roots in slavery and its devastating legacy on American and African history, its destructive power over both the enslaved and the enslaving. The book follows, in alternating chapters, the descendants of two half-sisters, one of whose family stays in Ghana and one of whose family is fated to travel on British slave ships to the Caribbean and thence to the British colonies in the American south. Sometimes almost unbearable to read, but compelling and beautifully written, with intervals of dreamlike power.

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the author of Americanah, is such a tender account of family life and culture in contemporary Nigeria, set in a time of national and family upheaval, that it could be cross-referenced with books about relationships and family. Deals with adolescent turbulence, political corruption, loyalty and freedom.

Sand Castle Girls by Chris Bohjalian. When I was growing up, I knew nothing of the brutal Armenian genocide that the Turks committed during the early years of the 20th century, systematically rounding up and killing more than a million and a half Armenian men, women and children by means of labor camps and death marches across the Syrian Desert. That holocaust led to the coining of the word “genocide” although Turkey to this day refuses the term. This remarkable historical novel by the Armenian-American Bohjalian is a compelling account of that horrific time and of the way nations do (and do not) respond to such calamities, the ways families survive (and do not) and remember (and forget) traumatic suffering. Given the theme, the moments of tender beauty and sorrow are particularly piercing and unforgettable.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman was a text my daughter read in the course of earning her master’s in public health, and recommended to me. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, it explores the tragic consequences of deadlock misunderstanding between American doctors and an immigrant Laotian family over the nature and treatment of a young child’s severe epilepsy. One of the best descriptions and dire warnings I know of what can happen when we fail to see or even want to bridge the gulf between cultures, mutually insisting that our own perspective is the only right one to plot a course of action.

Books can not only open us to see lives defined by racism, poverty and suspicion of other cultures, but to see the consequences of any systemic abuse of trust and power.

The whole world has been rocked in the last two decades by revelations of the horrific scale of sexual abuse of children by priests, and the widespread determination on the part of church hierarchy everywhere to cover up the scandal and protect the priests instead of the children involved. The Academy Award winning film Spotlight told the story of the The Boston Globe’s investigative team that broke the story in 2002. Two of the most sensitive and nuanced responses to that crisis are Faith: A Novel by the Pulitzer-winning author Jennifer Haigh and Doubt: A Parable by John Patrick Shanley, a Pulitzer-winning play (and now a film).

Faith observes the situation sideways as it were, chronicling the effect of allegations of abuse against a priest in a Boston parish on him and every member of his family. Everyone involved responds differently; deeply rooted tensions in the family come to light; the resolution of the mystery (is the priest innocent? guilty? if so, guilty of what exactly?) is brilliant and unexpected. Compassionate, startling, haunting, tender, the book offers no easy answers and little opportunity for righteous indignation.

Doubt is a drama (set in the Bronx in 1964) about allegations of abuse of a child by a priest in a Catholic school. It is also a kind of psychological thriller—an exploration of the motives and weaknesses and struggle for power between the parish priest and the nun who accuses him—and a bleak look at the church political machinery that determines the outcome. Again, no easy answers, and much doubt about what is true and right. (The 2008 film of the same name, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams as the nuns and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the charismatic priest, with Viola Davis as the boy’s mother, is excellent. All four actors were nominated for Academy Awards.)

Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine by Gail Honeyman takes a different kind of look at child abuse and childhood trauma (also the foster care system and urban social isolation) and the ways in which some people do (and don’t) survive all of that. Of course it’s clear from the beginning that Elinor Oliphant is far from “fine,” but we aren’t sure why until the end. Deftly written, carefully plotted and paced, with compassion and unexpected flashes of wit, this debut novel walks the razor’s edge between heartache and laughter, and is an ode to the saving power of friendship.

Several recent novels explore issues of domestic violence against women and the cultural and institutional tendencies to cover up, deny or exploit that violence.

Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen takes its title not only from the bruises that Fran tries to hide, the marks of savage beatings from her husband, but of the blue of his police uniform, and the conspiracy among the force to protect its own. Fran finally takes her young son and escapes to a new town and what she hopes will be a new life, but her past catches up with her: it is impossible to escape completely from the consequences of her choices and her husband’s wrath and his police connections. Quindlen is not only a good journalist who knows that the incidence of domestic violence among police families is two to four times the national average, but understands that police officers are armed, know where women’s shelters are located, and have access to systems that can track down runaways. Quindlen is also a fine novelist, and the pacing and plotting of this novel are first rate. It is grimly realistic and unsentimental but not without hope, and Fran’s courage is impressive.

Big Little Lies by Australian writer Liane Moriarty (author of What Alice Forgot, etc.) also takes on the issue of domestic abuse in the context of a friendship among three suburban moms whose children all attend the same school. One of the women has long suffered and hidden her banker husband’s violence against her; a second one was once raped by that same man; the third was traumatized by her own parents’ violent relationship. Everyone is keeping secrets and colluding in big and little lies. The shockingly satisfying denouement is a consequence of the strength of the women’s bond of loyalty, courage and defiance.

No Mark Upon Her is the fourteenth book in the terrific Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid police-procedural mystery series by Deborah Crombie, and unequivocally takes on the issue of sexual abuse and predation within the ranks of the police. When a high-ranking female detective at Scotland Yard is found murdered, secrets and lies are uncovered that will implicate the most senior members of the force: but to what effect? Will the corruption and abuse of power in the ranks extend to covering up murder by one of its own?

Women Talking by the prize-winning Canadian Mennonite author Miriam Toews is an astounding literary achievement, an imaginative sequel to actual events: the horrific, systematic, nightly drugging and rape of women and girls (as young as three, as old as sixty-five) in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia between 2005 and 2009. These crimes were perpetrated by the men of the colony, who blame satanic forces when the women wake bewildered, bleeding and in pain every morning. Toews’ novel, a surreptitious conversation among some of the women of the colony, hiding in a hayloft, debating whether to stay or leave, is a kind of surreal symposium on faith and rage, pacifism and the nature of reality, courage and freedom, obedience and forgiveness, grief and love and hate—with, at the same time, flashes of humor and lyrical beauty. Like no other entry in this list, it chronicles domestic violence against women and girls in a narrow historical and religious context that somehow nonetheless presents the issues as timeless and universal, in an atmosphere of almost mythic truth.

Another kind of social injustice and inequality—economic exploitation that keeps families in poverty—was brought to public awareness a generation ago by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. In order to get a first-hand view of living in poverty, Ehrenreich went undercover as an “unskilled” worker, taking low-paying jobs as everything from a motel maid to a home health aide to a Walmart sales clerk, living in trailer parks and seedy motels. As riveting as it was in 1998, this book can still change the way you see “the working poor” and think about welfare and the way you tip and the way you vote.

(Stephanie Land, whose recent best-selling memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive covers much of the same socioeconomic ground but from a personal angle, is a protégé of Ehrenreich’s, who also wrote the introduction to Land’s book.)

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Harvard sociology professor Matthew Desmond won the Pulitzer for nonfiction, and no wonder. Desmond spent years on painstaking and compassionate fieldwork, tracking eight families in the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee. In these pages we meet people struggling with low wages, physical disabilities, addiction, and the skyrocketing cost of housing in America. Forced to spend more than half their income on rent, and sometimes failing to make ends meet, they are increasingly evicted—usually informally rather than through the courts: some landlords simply remove the front doors of the apartments they own. Especially for single mothers, the fallout can be catastrophic, forcing them to live with their children in shelters, in abandoned houses, on the street. A careful study, both heartwrenching and inspiring, of how deeply rental housing is implicated in the creation of poverty, and how many caught in that poverty are determined to survive.

I am not usually a fan of dystopian fiction, but since I have admired Chris Bohjalian’s other novels, I took a chance on his Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands and and found it completely heartbreaking and deeply moving. It’s hard to classify: it touches on child and teen homelessness and abuse, the hidden costs of mental illness, the dangers of nuclear energy, even the tragedy of school shootings. I know these are not exactly uplifting subjects, but it is a remarkable literary feat, full of adventure and courage and friendship as well as apocalyptic calamity.

And now for something completely different—though touching on themes of racism, war and clashes between cultures—a novel that sheds light on a dark time in American history, specifically the settlement of the West and the shocking treatment of Native American tribes by the US government and by each other: The Color of Lightning by Paulette Jiles. At the end of the Civil War, a free black man and his family travel west from Kentucky hoping to start new lives in Texas; an idealistic but naïve Quaker hopes to persuade warring nomadic Comanches to become peaceful farmers; Comanche warriors ride back into camp, singing of victory in a slaughter of white settlers with a “light all around them and all around their war horses …as beautiful and dangerous as the color of lightning.” The Comanche warriors rape, murder and kidnap white settlers; some of the kidnapped whites, it turns out, don’t want to be rescued. This riveting novel, written with assurance and flair, is a fictional counterpoint to the Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne, and covers the same ground as one of John Wayne’s most famous movies The Searchers.

Since my mother sustained traumatic brain injury in a car accident when I was a child, and since both my parents suffered from dementia in the last years of their lives, I have always been fascinated by the phenomena of memory and language and neurological disabilities.

Reading Antonio Damasio’s book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, was revolutionary for me. Recommended by a neurologist friend who knew about my mother’s accident, this book gave me life-changing insight into the causes and effects of her injury that fateful day, and a way to understand its effect on all our family.

Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat in a more general way leads the reader into the intriguing, mysterious, and sometimes beautiful worlds of those who suffer neurological disease and injury.

Dementia: Living in the Memories of God by John Swinton can also be found on the list of books that explore what it means to be human. Far from pondering merely existential questions, this work challenges secular medical models of dementia and offers profound pastoral consolation for those enduring the ambiguous loss of those they love to Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia. Memory and cognition may erode, but our essential humanity remains.

Lisa Genova is a Harvard-educated neuroscientist and novelist, sometimes called the “Oliver Sacks of fiction.” Her books explore the lives of those with various brain injuries and diseases. Still Alice is about a Harvard neurology professor who shows early signs of Alzheimer’s, knows exactly what is happening to her, and tries desperately to cope with the unraveling of her fine mind. An insightful and compassionate exploration of the ravages of the disease on patients and families alike, the book was adapted to a film of the same name; Julianne Moore won a best actress Oscar for her performance in the title role.

The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean is a genre-bending novel that simultaneously deals with the 900-day siege of Leningrad by the Nazis and the role of Stalin’s intention to protect (read: steal) the treasures of the Hermitage art museum—and also with the ravages of Alzheimer’s. A young docent at the Hermitage during the siege, Marina is now an elderly woman living in America. She is losing her short-term memory alarmingly, but the past is both vivid in her mind and transformative in her spirit.

More and more these days, autismspectrum disorder is in the news and in public awareness. Several recent books, fiction and non-fiction, have helped me understand the phenomenon.

Emergence: Labeled Autistic by Temple Grandin is a remarkable memoir by a woman who grew from a fear-gripped, isolated, angry child to a high-functioning successful professional, a gifted animal scientist, a world leader in her field. She has written more than a dozen books, but Emergence tells the story of her own struggle to understand how she was different from other people, and how to find strategies that would allow her to connect with them and with herself.

The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to be a Better Husband by David Finch is hilarious and touching in equal parts, an improbable tale of ruthless self-improvement. When the author’s “mindblindness” (his inability to understand others’ feelings or read social cues) and compulsive behaviors began to threaten his marriage, being diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome was a relief. This was something he could do something about, he felt. He taught himself by trial and error how to act in ways that demonstrated respect for his wife: not turning off the radio in the kitchen when she was singing along, not interrupting when she was speaking, wearing swim trunks when bathing the children to avoid the hated sensation of wet cloth against his skin. A huge pile of post-it note reminders turned into this brutally honest, very funny, self-effacing account of how love and self-discipline can overcome some of the challenges of a “neurologically mixed marriage”—and could foster greater respect in any marriage.

M is for Autism is actually a collective memoir/novel, written by the students of a school for girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Britain who have communication and interaction difficulties. At turns funny and sad, it explores some of the ways adolescence is made even more fraught by the social and emotional challenges of teenagers “on the spectrum.”

Love Anthony is another novel by Lisa Genova, this one told poignantly and plausibly from the imagined perspective of a nonverbal boy with autism by his mother. Also a powerful story of women’s friendship, this is primarily a glimpse inside the lonely aching heart of a single mother who longs to reach her silent non-responsive child (“The spectrum is long and wide, and we’re all on it.”)

Another novel that explores the complicated worlds of those with autism is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Written nearly twenty years ago, this was my own introduction to autism, though the word is not used in the book. It is a quirky mystery novel; the detective is a fifteen-year-old boy who describes himself as “a mathematician with some behavioral difficulties.” Charming, endearing, and sad, “it is not a book about Asperger’s… if anything it’s a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way,” Haddon wrote later.

The Speed of Dark, a mesmerizing novel by Elizabeth Moon, challenged what I thought I knew about autism—and for that matter what I thought about human dignity and identity, and what constitutes “normal.” A high-functioning scientist with autism is offered, by the pharmaceutical company he works for, a “cure” for autism that will alter the way his brain functions at a fundamental level. Is autism a disease to be eradicated, or just another way of being? Lou Arrendale’s decision is courageous and all his own.

Celestial Navigation by Anne Tyler never uses the words autism or Asperger’s; we never really know why Jeremy is so isolated inside his own mind, why he is so very odd, why he never leaves the house. Set in the sixties, when mental illness and neurological disorders were poorly understood, the only diagnostic clue we get is Jeremy’s awful sister Amanda’s sniffy observation that he is “retarded.” But he is also a brilliant artist, reluctant and bewildered heir to his mother’s dilapidated boarding house in (of course) a seedy part of Baltimore, and the improbable common-law husband of the lovely single mother Mary. One of the boarders observes that Jeremy “sees from a distance at all times… he lives at a distance.”  Both he and Mary heroically try and tragically fail to find a way to bridge this distance. Warning: there is no happy ending here, but I imagine that the deep insightful compassion that Tyler (characteristically) has for all her characters might be consoling to anyone who knows how hard it can be to make love work.

It is important to remember, in this long catalogue of challenges and chronicles of pain, that sometimes our world is enlarged, and we can come to see with new eyes, not by learning of the sorrows faced by those whose lives are radically different from our own, but by rediscovering a sense of wonder in the natural world and its amazing creatures. “Enlarging” happens as a function of delight and discovery as well as empathy and dismay. When we learn to see with the eyes of the heart (Ephesians 1:18), we may not only become aware of the pain of others’ lives but be able to see “heaven in a grain of sand” as William Blake believed—or in the oceans’ unseen depths, or a wild snail that unexpectedly beguiles a long illness, or an abandoned baby owl that bonds with its human rescuer, or blind and spineless earthworms that inhabit a fascinating world beneath our feet, or trees that communicate with each other to share nutrients and warn each other of danger.

Rachel Carson’s prizewinning The Sea Around Us was an immediate bestseller when it was first published in 1951, and has become a classic of nature writing at its lyrically written and scientifically grounded best. We had a beautifully-illustrated edition of this treasure at home when I was growing up; it not only formed my abiding awareness of this blue planet as place of wonder and mystery but forged an early desire to become an oceanographer (which lasted until I fell in love with English literature in college and changed my major—but I still love the sea).

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating was written by Elisabeth Tova Bailey as a tribute to the common forest snail who entered her life as an unseen guest in a potted plant a friend gave her when she was sick in bed for an entire year. With the same mix of poetry and science that characterized The Sea Around Us, Bailey captivates us with the snail’s remarkable capacity for hydraulic locomotion, complex decision-making, and strange beauty—all of which she observed at close range and recorded with gratitude and respect for its quiet companionship.

Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl by Stacey O’Brien is a heartwarming and fascinating memoir by a young wildlife biologist and researcher at CalTech who adopts a baby owl too injured to be returned to the wild. For the next nineteen years, they live together, learn from each other, and end up rescuing each other. Sometimes hilarious, often touching, always intriguing about the improbable but undeniable human-wild-animal bonds of affection, loyalty, and mutual need.

The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms by Amy Stewart is another gem of nature writing. Stewart is a worthy heir of Darwin’s own studies of worms; this witty and engaging work will ensure that you never look at the lowly creatures the same way again. We owe them a lot: they aerate the soil and aid fishing, they enliven compost and act as biomonitors of toxic waste.

Speaking of earth and earthworms, William Bryant Logan’s Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth is a passionate, lyrical ode to dirt itself, part natural history, part a kind of prayer of praise for the dust of which we are made, the essential “skin” of the planet. Gardeners and naturalists love this book, but it’s a marvelous corrective for anyone (perhaps most of us) inclined to take the living mystery beneath our feet for granted. A delightful mix of science, history, and story.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer is a similarly winsome marriage, as the subtitle reflects, of botany and the native lore of the author’s own Potawatomi Nation heritage. With respect for Native American wisdom that borders on prayer, we read of “the gift of strawberries,” “the consolation of water lilies,” and “epiphany among the beans” and are persuaded of the links between ecological activism and a culture of gratitude.

Rachel Carson, marine biologist and superb nature writer, author of The Sea Around Us and Silent Spring, also wrote a long personal essay that she felt was among her most important works: The Sense of Wonder: A Celebration of Nature for Parents and Children. A tender account of a summer adventure shared with her four-year-old grandnephew on the coast of Maine, this small book promotes not scientific-instruction-of-the-young so much as the shared delight of companionable rambles along the shore and in the woods, enjoying what they offer to our senses (even at the cost of interfering with bedtime and getting mud on the rug). A new edition, with an introduction by Carson’s biographer Linda Lear and superb nature photographs by Nick Kelsh, was published in 2017.

What might it be like—how might it forever change your body, mind, and spirit—to be electrocuted while walking in the rain? Nature writer Gretel Ehrlich tells us in A Match to the Heart: One Woman’s Story of Being Struck by Lightning, a fascinating, moving and lyrical memoir that explores the mysteries, myths, and science of electrical storms and the human heart, which she came to know intimately after “electricity carved its blue path” toward her as she was out walking near her Wyoming ranch. The lightning flung her to the ground so hard she sustained a concussion, broken ribs, a broken jaw, lacerations and burns, as well as temporary paralysis—all of which required intensive treatment and a long journey of survival, self-discovery and rebirth.

I confess I approached The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate―Discoveries from A Secret World by Peter Wohlleben with a bit of trepidation, thinking it might be a kind of Druid new-age woo-woo ode (technical term) to the earth-magic of nature. In fact, Wohlleben brings to this internationally bestselling book twenty years’ experience as a professional forester in Germany, trained to see trees and forests merely as economic commodities. His eyes were opened to their complex inner lives and “secret world” when he began taking walks in the woods with people who were more attuned to their ancient and underlying mysteries. This book draws on recent science—demonstrating that forests actually are social networks that permit elaborate communication between trees to signal danger or need—as well as his own love of the forest and its creatures. Prepare to have your own eyes opened.

And sometimes it’s not so much that our world needs to be enlarged as that our perspective on it needs to be radically altered. A remarkable book that challenged a great deal of what I thought to be indisputable (and indisputably catastrophic) is Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, the famous Swedish professor of global health, and his son and daughter-in-law Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund. Dr. Rosling spent his life “fighting devastating ignorance,” as he put it, with data that “sings” as someone has said. “I don’t tell you not to worry or be afraid,” he writes in this book: “I tell you worry about the right things… Be less stressed by the imaginary problems of an overdramatic world, and more alert to the real problems and how to solve them.” This extremely well-researched work is both sensible and exhilarating—and actually, factually reassuring about the the future of our planet and its people.

Literary Recommendations for All Sorts of Times and States of Mind