The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years
by Sunil Amrith (Allen Lane, £30)
The recent path of human destruction is easy to see. We have felled forests and pumped oceans full of plastic. We have slaughtered entire species, and each other. We have plunged greedy hands into the ground and guddled around for clusters of atoms and the remains of life now extinct, which we have burned as oil and coal, heating the Earth as never before. Why have we done all this?
In The Burning Earth, Sunil Amrith offers us an answer that is not wholly original, but bears repeating. Human beings are driven by want, he says, not only for essential food and shelter—which all creatures seek—but for luxuries. We want to escape the constraints and vagaries of nature altogether, and have pursued this so ferociously that we have pushed the systems on which life depends to their limits.
Amrith confronts us with the consequences of our want and its futility. He reminds us of “our creatureliness”, our symbiotic relationship with the environment and our place as minority members of a much bigger system. In example after example—from the Mongol empire to the transatlantic slave trade and the Brazilian Amazon—he hammers home the message that human mastery of the environment is an illusion, the pursuit of which has caused immense damage.
The Burning Earth is truly a world history, which places greater emphasis on perspectives from the Global South than many other books allow. It is a critique of empire and of the compulsive consumption of modern economies: horrendous details about our most exploitative actions will be imprinted on the brain of any reader. (For me, it was the fact that sharks learned to follow transatlantic slave ships, sustained by the corpses of Africans who died in the hold and were thrown overboard.)
Across 350 pages, this account of the relentless march of human greed makes for grim reading. But then again, isn’t that the point? For centuries, we’ve pillaged the Earth, thinking we can escape the consequences. If Amrith’s task is to break that illusion, he succeeds.
Ellen Halliday
Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places
by Paul Collier (Allen Lane, £25)
Never has an elegant image had such ugly consequences. Milton Friedman claimed that industrial shocks were like plucking a harp string: things briefly wobble but soon settle back to where they started. The economist Paul Collier blames this complacent line of thinking for pockets of stagnation around the world, from Zambia’s copper belt to the rusted steel belt of his native South Yorkshire.
In place of the harp-string, Collier envisages a masted dinghy in a storm. Sure, it will settle once the winds pass, but, depending on how it’s been steered, this boat may be happily afloat once more—or instead capsized, with the mast pointing down to the seabed. To allow high winds, or indeed market forces, to do their worst is to be indifferent to the virtuous circle or the downward spiral that will pull you under.
This contrast of images is a terrific way to frame what would otherwise be a bewildering morass of material. Collier covers off vogueish topics in economic theory, such as radical uncertainty; gritty mechanics of policy, such as development finance institutions; and name-dropping anecdotes about the likes of Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he got to know and wants us to understand as neither the saint nor the more recent monster of western imagination, but as a politician manoeuvring to build some sort of order in desperately fluid circumstances.
Myriad things can help the left-behind catch up: grassroots knowledge, devolved power, good leadership, enlightened finance and, above all, a sense of common endeavour. There’s no one-size-fits-all prescription to rival the laissez-faire formula, but then Collier’s whole point is to dispatch with arid, experience-indifferent deductive theorising, and instead found policy on “abductive” explanations that grapple with the reality of particular places. That switch heralds a big improvement on the “greed-sodden capitalism” of the Friedmanite hegemony.
Tom Clark
Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life
by Lulu Miller (One, £16.99)
Talk about force majeure. In the late 1800s, the scientist—and first president of Stanford University—David Starr Jordan had his entire collection of fish specimens, all carefully preserved in glass jars and categorised and labelled by their owner, destroyed after a bolt of lightning struck his laboratory.
Then, in the early 1900s, the great San Francisco earthquake did similar catastrophic damage to his newer collection. Both times, Jordan simply began again, literally stitching labels into the flesh of scattered fish to rescue the knowledge he had accumulated over years.
The science journalist Lulu Miller came to Jordan’s story after a catastrophe of her own—a severe break-up—and saw in him an exemplar of unbowed doggedness, a model for how to keep on keeping on. How could she not be drawn in?
Or at least that’s the opening conceit of Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist, which is finally being published in the UK after four years of accolades and sales in the US. And it probably is a conceit, for Miller must have known what she might discover in Jordan: one of the most prominent and virulent American eugenicists of the 20th century, as well as someone who is strangely implicated in the murder of Jane Stanford—of, yes, those Stanfords.
Still, this tale is so compelling and Miller’s telling of it so skilful that it’s a pleasure to succumb to her sleights of hand. Here is a book that hops nimbly between biography and autobiography, gritty science and lovelorn self-help. And its final, happy leap into the unknown is just astonishing.
Peter Hoskin
The Shortest History of Music
by Andrew Ford (Old Street Publishing, £14.99)
In his introduction to The Shortest History of Music, composer and broadcaster Andrew Ford poses the question of what music is. He is sure of what it is not—he warns us that “we must never fall for the line that [music] is a universal language… music communicates nothing, it is something.”
So what, then, is it? And how can we begin to write a history of something when we don’t know exactly what it is? The opening chapters suggest that this book might be a quest to answer this question and, although a six-page epilogue does attempt to do so, The Shortest History of Music is more of a broad view on the many people, technologies and communities that have contributed to our understanding of music today.
It is a relief that Ford explores this terrain thematically. Over five chapters, he delves into the tradition of music, the history of notation, music as a trade, music and modernism, and recording music.
Ford’s historical and technical knowledge is vast, the depth of his research astounding. As he acknowledges, it is impossible to write an exhaustive history of music when so much music has not been recorded or written down, either because women or people of colour have lacked the same professional opportunities as their white, male counterparts, or because almost all music outside western classical music has been passed down orally or was improvised.
The sheer amount of information in such a short book, however, means the main chapters lack room to breathe. The prose, laden with terminology, can resemble more of an academic essay than something for the general reader.
This book is fascinating, broad and (like all good histories) has humanity at its centre. It is cursed, though, by its own definition—and the reader is left feeling as if they have been hurried through a museum of music without being allowed to dwell at any of the exhibits.
Lucy Hicks Beach
A Sunny Place for Shady People
by Mariana Enriquez (Granta, £14.99)
“No one was afraid, or at least not of real things, just ghosts and goblins,” writes Mariana Enríquez in “Face Disgrace”, an early story in this seductively gothic collection. What is real and what is not, however, is not so clear-cut. The supernatural entities that loom over Enríquez’s Argentinian landscapes brazenly, gleefully break the boundaries between our fleshly world and theirs.
After a slight departure with her uneven 736-page novel Our Share of the Night, Enríquez has returned to the succinct, sardonic style she established with prior collections such as The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (shortlisted for the International Booker Prize)—and she is at the height of her powers.
This collection continues to find fertile ground in Argentina’s troubled history: one story deals with an abandoned palace repurposed during the military dictatorship as a “clandestine detention centre”, another with a “fridge cemetery” brought into being by the stark depletion of industry. The scars of much more recent events are also evident, the Covid-19 pandemic—and Taylor Swift—adding additional layers of hell to a couple’s Airbnb getaway.
Enríquez also persists in her fascination with the sinews between the corporeal and the ghostly realms, everyday injustices and extraordinary “evil”: at her fiercest, she sets down morbid manifestations of misogyny and female desire, rooted by a scythe-sharp, bone-dry humour. Porn, body modifications and necrophilia have been commonplace in Enríquez’s work, but this might be her most untrammelled—and certainly her most unwavering—collection yet. It’s an array of stories that will keep you in their chokehold.
Miriam Balanescu
