A Traveler’s Guide to the End of the World: Tales of Fire, Wind, and Water

In this sobering wake-up call, Gessner (Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight), a creative writing professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, recounts his 2021 cross-country travels to locales hit hard by climate change. Surveying the ravages of a warming planet, he tells of visiting 91-year-old environmentalist Ken Sleight at his farm near Pack Creek, Utah, where wildfires destroyed Sleight’s home and cleared the way for a devastating flash flood a month later, calamities that sapped Sleight’s “spirit to fight on.” In Paradise, Calif., Gessner hears from weary residents who were still struggling to rebuild their lives after 2018’s Camp Fire even as they were “again under threat of evacuation, this time from the nearby Dixie Fire.” Throughout, Gessner waxes poetic on the existential questions posed by climate change, as when he writes of the impossibility of wrapping one’s head around the scale of the problem: “We are all small.... For us there is only the trying.” The focus on individuals impacted by global warming highlights the despair and other intangible costs of extreme weather, and spirited prose enlivens the proceedings (“The ocean spits forth foam as if rabid, and then builds up with great humpbacked power”). It’s a meditative and elegiac look at a country on the brink. (June)