At the same time, the author is keenly aware of our dire political and climate conditions. She strives mightily to resist the bad feelings these situations engender: “Too often I feel I am living in a country I no longer recognize, a country determined to imperil every principle I hold dear and many of the people I love, too. Immersing myself in the natural world of my own backyard … is the way I cope with whatever I think I cannot bear.”

Those of us in the hyper-connected world—that is, just about all other beings around the world—have, it seems, a perverse fascination with tribes who repudiate all contact with the outside world or are justifiably fearful of external contamination. It’s almost impossible to imagine a life devoid (or blessedly relieved) of modern “conveniences.”

In Atoms and Ashes, Plokhy leads us on a “guided tour” of disasters besetting nuclear power in the past 70 years. These include the Castle Bravo nuclear test on the Marshall Islands (1954); the explosion of a nuclear waste tank at Kyshtym, in the Ural Mountains of the Soviet Union (1957); a fire at the Windscale Works in England (1957); Three Mile Island in the U.S. (1979); Chernobyl, still the standard-bearer for everything that can go wrong with nuclear power (1986); and the Fukushima multiple reactor meltdown in Japan (2011), among the most calamitous of those under scrutiny here.

The Arsonist, a true crime account of Black Saturday, is divided into three sections: “The Detectives,” “The Lawyers,” and “The Courtroom.” Within this structure, Hooper methodically details the efforts of the Victorian Arson Squad to investigate the horrific blaze -- in particular, one fire that broke out in a forestry plantation near the town of Churchill. Investigators quickly determined the fire was deliberately set in this remote location in Australia’s coal country.