Also of interest...in dying breeds

Eating to Extinction

by Dan Saladino (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30)

Touring the globe with Dan Saladino can be “both disturbing and enchanting,” said Molly Young in The New York Times. In Eating to Extinction, the BBC food journalist calls attention to the marvelous diversity of plant and animal life that people eat around the world, often bringing out a “soul-deep” connection between a community and its food. But this “passionately pedagogical” book is also a warning about the homogenization of our food sources, “a form of dark tourism, with doom hovering over each edible miracle.”

Otherlands

by Thomas Halliday (Random House, $29)

This riveting reverse tour through Earth’s history is “more literature than traditional popular science,” said Amy Brady in Scientific American. “Writing with gusto and bravado,” paleontologist Thomas Halliday opens in the present and works backward epoch by epoch. As we follow along, Earth “gets weirder and weirder, the creatures more alien,” yet we remain immersed, and emerge in the end more attuned to the balance of any ecosystem and how life today is connected to the world of 550 million years ago.

God: An Anatomy

by Francesca Stavrakopoulou (Knopf, $35)

“Boldly simple in concept, God: An Anatomy is stunning in its execution,” said Jack Miles in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Religious scholar Francesca Stavrakopoulou argues that the God of the Old Testament’s early books was believed by his worshippers to literally be a large, handsome, strapping, masculine figure, not an intangible force, and she backs her case with close textual analysis. As she studies her “ruddy god” from toes to head, a reader can disagree with her interpretations and still find them “endlessly stimulating.”

The Impossible Art

by Matthew Aucoin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)

Matthew Aucoin’s essays on opera “brilliantly interweave the scholarly and the personal,” said Willard Spiegelman in The Wall Street Journal. The 31-year-old composer, whose Eurydice debuted at the Met last year, has been entranced with the endangered art form since age 8, and he’s a great champion of its power and relevance. As at home discussing Radiohead as variations on the Orpheus myth, he “pours out insight after insight,” illuminating both the music and language of the medium he loves.