Books like When It All Burns — picked by fans

Even before A Civil Action became a Hollywood film, the book’s characters pulled me into the true story of a whole town and the question of how so many families there were poisoned.

I loved the book because it told a real underdog story in a totally gripping way, through a main character I didn’t expect to like. I’ve given this book to friends.

It’s a stretch to call this true crime, but I found this a compelling detective story, wrapped in geological and human mystery. It felt like true crime.

Iconic author John McPhee tags along with geologist Eldridge Moores on field research trips, searching the rocks of the disruptive San Andreas fault for clues to where geological history and human history collide. I was driving through California myself while I was reading the book, and the chapters alternated deep geological time with the march of human time—the frenzy of the Gold Rush, the Donner Party disaster. McPhee pulls these together.

The story reaches a climax with a vivid, hair-raising account of one of the great earthquakes of our time and the overwhelming power of nature.

I love graphic memoirs and the scope they give for visualizing life and entire movements. 

I was surprised and thrilled to pick up Craig Thompson’s book Ginseng Roots. Craig grew up in the ginseng farming area of Wisconsin. His family and others—including some I interviewed myself two decades before—give a rich picture of the ups and downs. He tells a story of connections with that tradition from boyhood, and the dreams and mishaps that inspired.

His drawings are rich, imaginative, and precise at the same time. I found this to be a gripping account of life, death, nature, and connection.

This graphic history is a short, beautiful book that features the spectacular wildlife in the Sea of Cortez off the shore of Mexico.

I loved how artist Ava Salzman shows conservation workers piecing together clues of what’s causing endangered sea creatures there to disappear. The book shifts nimbly to the viewpoint of an investigative team going undercover to solve the mystery and find and convict wildlife traffickers. I found the story and images so dramatic—the inky drawings of the night stakeouts, the painstaking analysis.

It’s a story I could not find in film or photographs due to sensitive legal issues. I’m gobsmacked by how well Salzman worked with the team to tell this important story in such a cinematic way.

I love this book because it hammers home the consequences of relentless energy development. One quote in particular says it all as far as drilling for oil is concerned: “One place cannot be drained for the sake of another without damage to a larger interconnected whole.” Santa Barbarans learned this in 1969. Extraction Ecologies warns of the consequences of climate change for all of us and the species with whom we share an increasingly fragile existence.

I also love this book because Miller uses books I had not read since high school, such as King Solomon’s Mines, to analyze the changes to landscapes and economic and social structures catalyzed by nineteenth-century industrialization and imperialism. Since reading the book, I have been rereading these books in a whole new light.

I love this book because it explains in a compelling and highly readable way why we humans have charted a path utterly dependent on fossil fuels that marks the Anthropocene and threatens our way of life, if not our very existence. And ultimately, why California will continue to burn. Like Elizabeth Carolyn Miller and Michael Lobel, Stoll shows us our future by digging into our nineteenth-century past.

It is our relentless quest to accumulate and consume that will spell our doom. This need translates into a global and collective pursuit of economic growth. To be sure, oil companies have sowed doubt about the consequences of fossil fuel combustion. But we love our stuff. Even now we are looking for ways to keep on having more of it. And so we are all complicit.

How can you resist the mix of Zen Buddhist philosophy and wildfire disaster? Set in the dry California mountains, I was truly moved by the story of how these folks viewed the threat of wildfire at a personal and group level, prepared for and survived a (real) approaching wildfire, and how they dealt with its resultant consequences.

Interestingly, since this first fire and the book, the monastery has been repeatedly threatened again. I found the book very real, aided by the fact that the author visited my campus. The story is not without paradoxes and challenging decisions. But the complex dilemmas presented and the lessons learned hold great insight into how society might learn to live better with fire.  

Another fire, another story, this one a graphic memoir about the 2017 wildfires that ravaged Northern California, claiming dozens of lives and destroying the author's home. It's a beautiful book, illustrated with a simplicity and starkness that pulls you inexorably forward. The night of the fire itself is present in the narrative, but the majority of the book is occupied with what comes after: the unexpected kindness of friends and strangers, the nonlinear progression of grief, the bureaucracy and absurdism of tragedy, and all the questions of how you begin to rebuild.

This is an amazing book on many levels and makes you look at every Van Gogh painting you’ve ever seen in the context of industrialization and the damage it was causing to the landscapes we associate with nature and beauty in the late nineteenth century.

The beautifully reproduced artworks are replete with smokestacks and locomotive engines spewing smoke into the air from coal combustion. Van Gogh also gives us polluted canals and rivers. Lobel shows us what we miss when looking at Van Gogh as a depiction of nature. I am now itching to get back to the Van Gogh Museum at all those irises in a whole new light. Like Extraction Ecologies, this book shows us our future from a distant past.

Because of obvious limitations—space in the garden, sun, availability, and one’s responsibility to be a conscientious steward during a probably unending California drought—it’s impossible to grow as many roses as one would like. It’s not impossible, however, to content oneself with two or three plants for cutting flowers, and, instead, moon over this comprehensive collection of gorgeous photographs, descriptions of form, petal counts, habits, parentage, and scents. Keep 2,000 roses on the bookshelf. This book is a treasure.