It’s late November, and I’m in Cerro Pelón, a mountain range straddling the border of the Estado de México and its neighboring state, Michoacán. Just two and a half hours west of Mexico City, the most populous city in North America, is the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a protected region of 217 square miles. In the rugged, subtropical coniferous forest of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt at an elevation of 11,500 feet, I am witness to one of the most incredible natural phenomena on Earth: the monarch butterfly migration.
Gazing at the clouds of monarchs, it’s easy to imagine them as infinite. But as Monika Maeckle, founder of the Texas Butterfly Ranch, described solemnly, “From the perspective of someone who’s witnessed this for 20 years now, it used to be these dramatic pulses of monarchs…[but now] we’re seeing more of a dribbling constant.” A knot forms in my throat as I realize that what I’m seeing, though incredible, is a mere fraction of what once was. Obtaining an accurate count on the butterflies is a moving target. It is difficult to get good numbers on how many are left and how fast we are losing them. In 2014, the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimated that the eastern population of monarchs had declined around 84% since the 1990s, when their numbers were upwards of one billion. Though the butterflies’ numbers fluctuate yearly, they’ve been trending downward. In July 2022, monarch butterflies officially joined the endangered species list.
First and foremost, “A Line in the Sand” is a stunning novel. Kevin Powers provides what any discerning reader desires the most — complex and flawed characters, precise use of language, succinct description and believable dialogue.
The House of Doors is Tan’s first novel since 2012’s Booker-shortlisted The Garden of Evening Mists and shares many of its themes. It’s a book about memory, loss and cultural dissonance; a high-flown tragedy that sideslips through the decades and passes the narrative baton between Lesley and Maugham. While Tan – born in Penang of Straits Chinese descent – is deliberately writing in the voice of the oppressor, he generally does so with care, conscious of the limits of his characters’ language and worldview. If colonial Malaysia is a pastiche of middle-class England, his drama is its costumed morality play.
You have undoubtedly heard of “road rage” — the kind of impetuous fury that erupts when motorists are stuck in traffic or on the move. But even when the driving ends, parking is no picnic either.
Henry Grabar opens “Paved Paradise,” his wry and revelatory new book about parking (a combination of words I never thought I would write), with a scrum that started when two cars vied for a scarce curbside spot in Queens and ended when a white Audi crashed through a bakery’s plate-glass window. Disputes over parking can turn violent; a few dozen times a year, they turn deadly.
In an era of internet saturation, The Age of Guilt offers a salutary good, a critical look at contemporary culture with an eye toward changing it for the better. Edmundson dares readers to imagine themselves at their best because, as he concludes, “[w]here super-ego was, there human ideals may be. There, in a thriving democracy, they may be.”