Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  How to Be, by Adam Nicolson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This eminently readable tour of Greek philosophy from approximately 650 to 450 B.C. brings the “sea-and-city world” of Heraclitus and Homer to life. Anchoring his study in Iron Age Greece, with its bustling mercantile economy and conflicting embraces of both slavery and personal autonomy, Nicolson traces the emergence of several key philosophical concepts. In the poetry of Sappho, he locates the stirrings of an interior self; in the writings of Xenophanes, the political mind; in the thought of Pythagoras, an immortal soul. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The End of Eden, by Adam Welz (Bloomsbury). By cataloguing wildlife whose habitats have been thrown into disarray by climate change, Welz, an environmental journalist, details some of the “cascades of chaos” that define our ecological era. In Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria decimated the island’s endangered indigenous parrot, the iguaca, killing the last birds able to pass down the species’s language. The depletion of the Pacific Coast’s sunflower sea star has led sea urchins, formerly the starfish’s prey, to begin feeding on seaweed that nearby fish depend on. Welz’s study, which he conceived as an attempt to examine such disruptions “without turning myself to stone,” amounts to a haunting warning. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The Unsettled, by Ayana Mathis (Knopf). Set in Philadelphia in the nineteen-eighties, this absorbing novel follows a mother and son as they search for a place to live, eventually landing in a derelict family shelter. Mathis’s chapters alternate among several points of view, but she primarily orbits the mother’s consciousness. Everything in her life is unsettled: her grip on reality, her relationship with her son’s father, her childhood home in a dwindling Black town in Alabama, where her estranged mother lives. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. The English Experience, by Julie Schumacher (Doubleday). The third in a series of academic satires about Jason Fitger, a hapless Midwestern professor of English, this book finds the divorced failed novelist coerced into chaperoning a group of undergraduates on a winter-break excursion called Experience: England. Fitger harbors “a vague hostility to all things British,” and his sojourn in London is calamitous: he injures himself, bungles his pedagogic responsibilities, and obsesses about his ex-wife’s possible departure for a job in Chicago. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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