Paperbacks new and noteworthy

A selection of summaries from The New York Times Book Review:

The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks,

by Terry Tempest Williams. (Picador, $18.) After visiting 12 national parks, Williams examines their role in shaping the country’s politics, history and people. Her writing can take on an activist’s urgency: Williams’“alarm at humanity’s calamitous impact on nature is indelibly imprinted in her writing,” Andrea Wulf wrote in The New York Times.

Nicotine, by Nell Zink. (Ecco/ HarperCollins, $15.99.) With her father in hospice, Penny returns to his childhood home in New Jersey, where she encounters a troupe of squatters who have overrun the homestead. She soon falls in love with their unofficial chief, Rob, and with their way of life. When Penny’s family moves to evict the squatters, she must act to protect their fragile community.

Revolution on the Hudson: New York City and the Hudson River Valley in the American War of Independence, by George C. Daughan. (Norton, $18.95.) As a central economic channel,

connecting New England to the other colonies, the Hudson River was a critical strategic front for both sides during the Revolutionary War. But Britain’s intense pursuit of winning control of the region during the conflict may have cost it victory, Daughan argues.

Magic and Loss: The

Internet as Art, by Virginia Heffernan. (Simon & Schuster, $17.) The internet is too often hailed as simply a technological achievement, without enough attention to its creative foundation, Heffernan, a journalist and critic, says. She approaches the web as an artistic masterpiece, structuring her book around what she sees as its aesthetic building blocks: design, text, photography and music.

Selection Day, by Aravind Adiga. (Scribner, $16.) Two brothers in India are groomed by their poor father to become cricket stars. The story “pulses with affection for Mumbai,” Marcel Theroux wrote in The Times. Theroux praises the book’s “broad sweep, accomplished with commendable economy and humor, in a sinewy, compact prose that has the grace and power of a gifted athlete.”