Erin Moore

Job: Librarian II – Youth Services Librarian, San Carlos Library, San Diego Public Library

She recommends: “Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal” by George Packer (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021; 226 pages) Why? Partisans who offend easily should proceed with caution when picking up the latest work from award-winning journalist George Packer. Rather than blame one side over another as many political analysts do, Packer addresses the presentday problem of hyperpolarization with an evenhanded approach that pardons no one. He explains that responsibility for our current crisis extends beyond the familiar red/blue binary. Our disagreements can now be better understood from a four-pronged framework of competing group narratives, which Packer labels: Free America, Smart America, Real America and Just America. Each of these visions of American identity provides its adherents with a sense of meaning and purpose. Together, however, these zero-sum worldviews are tearing the country apart. Though Packer offers no easy solutions, he suggests that a renewed interest in civil discourse may pave a way forward. By writing with candor and humility, Packer helps us get the conversation started.

Seth Marko

Job: Owner, The Book Catapult

He recommends: “Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-human Landscape” by Cal Flyn (Viking, 2021; 384 pages)

Why? A fascinating, firsthand exploration of 12 places around the world that have been abandoned by humanity — like Chernobyl, the Korean DMZ, Detroit, the Salton Sea — in an attempt to discover whether Earth is able to reclaim and heal from the effects of human hands. These are not pristine, untainted places, but rather human-abandoned “islands” where “nature has (since) been allowed to work unfettered.” And for the most part, Flyn finds that the planet will recover from us over a long enough timeline — even if that means millennia. The result is a hopeful, energizing travelogue of sorts that shows we should never give up on the places we’ve damaged and ignored. All is not lost, but that doesn’t mean we should carry on as we have been, as we should be much more responsible members of the broader, interconnected planet.

Welcome to our literary circle, in which San Diegans pass the (printed) word on books