Briefly Noted Book Reviews

“The Burning Earth,” by Sunil Amrith; “The Notebook,” by Roland Allen; “Enlightenment,” by Sarah Perry; and “The Sequel,” by Jean Hanff Korelitz.

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Find anything you save across the site in your account The Burning Earth, by Sunil Amrith (Norton). In this expansive book, a historian places the earth’s ecological plight in the context of human exploitation. Amrith’s inventory of crucial events begins with the Charter of the Forest of 1217, which granted common people rights to England’s forests. Surveying gold-mining operations in South Africa and oil extraction in Baku, among other enterprises, Amrith recognizes the inseparability of environmental distress and political, economic, and social factors. As he recounts attempts by human beings to squeeze value out of natural resources, he also examines changing attitudes about our relationship to the natural world, which we have long regarded—erroneously, he argues—as separate from, rather than symbiotic with, our species. The Notebook, by Roland Allen (Biblioasis). The profound cultural and intellectual impact of the notebook is the subject of this wide-ranging history, which traces the unassuming object’s development from ancient wax tablets to modern-day Moleskines. Through the centuries, notebooks and allied forms such as sketchbooks have been indispensable tools for merchants, writers, artists, scientists, and everyday people. Allen’s narrative moves fluidly as he recounts the evolution of the notebook’s use—touching on medieval trading routes and contemporary artist studios—and explores its role in both mundane tasks and world-changing innovations. Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction. Enlightenment, by Sarah Perry (Mariner). This tale of faith and obsession, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize, follows a pair of friends from an insular Baptist community in Essex, England. As one of them searches for a ghost that has haunted him since childhood, he becomes a rapturous student of physics and astronomy. “Occasionally it struck him that his love for the stars was no less a matter of faith than his remaining love for God,” Perry writes. Though the friends’ love stories form the novel’s heart, the book also navigates their attempts to find enlightenment beyond the boundaries of their community, as they question the binaries of goodness and sin, faith and doubt. The Sequel, by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Celadon). In “The Plot,” the best-selling forerunner to this propulsive thriller, the novelist Jacob Finch Bonner dies by his wife’s hand, after becoming a literary star for having written a novel that—unbeknownst to him—is based on her grisly life story. That wife, Anna Williams-Bonner, is the quicksilver protagonist of this book, which follows her after she writes a novel of her own: ostensibly a roman à clef retelling of the events surrounding her husband’s suicide, it is in fact a cover for murder. The novel makes Anna a star, but her success is soon punctured by anonymous messages indicating that somebody knows the truth about Jacob’s source material. Korelitz spins Anna’s pursuit of her accuser into a satisfying hunt, threading it with her antihero’s hilariously jaundiced opinions of literary life. A wedding ring that lost itself. How the World’s 50 Best Restaurants are chosen. Did a scientist put millions of lives at risk—and was he right to do it? Linda Ronstadt has found another voice. The Web site where millennial women judge one another’s spending habits. The foreign students who saw Ukraine as a gateway to a better life. An essay by Haruki Murakami: “The Running Novelist.” Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. Sections More © 2024 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices

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